https://www.innov.energy/en/salt-technology

I started looking at this today because one of my work colleagues told me of his experience looking after a business that had quite a few E Scooters in storage and two of the batteries caught on fire. To put them out you literally have to submerge them in water and keep them there for 2 weeks. He said seeing the batteries explode under water was terrifying.

At the time no country had any procedures in place to handle these battery Fires ( Australia was first ).
There is a rumour that Tesla is looking at the salt battery.

Water will accelerate the burning of a lot of compounds. If a house is on fire and there is no isolation switch for the array, the firies will just act to protect neighbouring properties and the fire itself won't get a drop of water. That is more due to the DC coming out of the panels than any adverse chemical reaction though.

Lithium Ion batteries that are known to catch fire are those with cobalt cathodes. On one hand, cobalt prevents internal corrosion and thus helps prevent spontaneous combustion. On the other hand if water gets on the lithium cobalt mix the battery will catch fire and more water will not extinguish the flames. The very high voltages found in EV car batteries just sets of a chain reaction that simply cannot be controlled.

Lithium Ion batteries with an iron cathode are less dense than the above and thus don't hold as much energy but they are much safer to handle, use and charge. In short, they don't just blow up for no good reason. I use these batteries for camping and coupled with a DC-DC converter and a 350W solar panel there is potentially limitless power available based on the energy consumption that is typical of one of my camps.

Other minerals that will not like water being put on their flames include phosphorus, magnesium and sodium.

If an electric car is on fire, firies will just act to protect other property.

Tesla did not design the batteries which have some sort of ceramic electrolyte. Apparently by fast charging this Electrolyte develops cracks.

Metal dendrites then form and penetrate into the cracks and away it goes. like a "China syndrome". According to one published quotation from a US Fire Department, it takes 42 Minutes and 600 US gallons per minute to quell a Tesla fire.

A 500Kg battery around 260Watt /hrs per Kg would be around 130KW

Marc

Fast charging is a false economy with any battery and it is being wrongly marketed as some sort of bandaid job to compensate for low range offered by electric cars. Battery technology needs to improve markedly before range for a lot of people becomes acceptable.

Regardless of the technology used, force-feeding a charge will shorten the life of the cells.

To convert the above - that's 88,000 litres of water to put out a fire. Incredible.

The other thing I found (after investigating) is that like any battery, these car batteries will die after a few years, requiring very expensive replacement (reportedly > $20k for a Tesla). Not only that, but the old batteries can't be recycled because of the way they are made and the amount of glue in them to hold it all together.

So not only will we be heading for a landfill disaster down the road, but they could then catch fire and be impossible to put out. It will be like those coal mine fires that smoulder away for years.

This whole electric car business smells of a scam. Even if it wasn't, who wants to spend all day at some remote service station while waiting for the thing to charge up? Not me.

I've never even seen a charging station yet. There's certainly none around where I live or go.

One notes that a lot of this greenified stuff has a sting in its tail.
Whist there is plastic everywhere............

High capacity Motive storage Batteries are a recycle nightmare.

A Tesla & others battery China syndrome, is almost impossible to stop until the core is out of energy. Albeit that a US gallon is an Imperial wine gallon (6 pints) that's still a hell of a lot of polluted water.

If trees are sourced for paper bags, for every 80 tree equivalents of recycle, you need 20 more new tree equivalents to give it strength.

And on it goes.

Albeit that a US gallon is an Imperial wine gallon...

Roughly 3.5 litres.

I came home from Chicken Treat (it's a bit like Red Rooster) the other night with a family feast and one of the paper bags dropped its guts as I got out of the car. No harm done apart from a few spilt peas but it is a 21st century problem. In the old days when supermarkets gave out paper bags for groceries, they were made to handle moisture and in my experience they rarely went mushy.

The good thing about the plastic bags we'd all end up getting used to is that they stopped me having to buy bin liners. So the question must be asked - are we really preventing plastics going into landfill? The classic bin liner is the ultimate example of a single-use plastic bag. I remember a time when about 60% of household waste was burned once a week in backyard incinerators. The greenies didn't like that either.

As for recycling car batteries, the only places I know of that do this only recycle lead-acid batteries. There are obvious hazards with handling expired high-tension battery packs including the poisonous contents and the fact that the battery may still have some energy tucked away. HT batteries usually deliver between 15,000 and 20,000 volts and it wouldn't be delivered in microamps so the shock risk is high.

In most electric cars the battery is put where the transmission and propeller shaft tunnels once were and removing the battery would mean removing much of the car's interior first. In a petrol or diesel car, it's a matter of unwinding two wingnuts.

There may be a transition from buying a battery and the car comes as an option. The middle of the car is probably the safer option. It does need to get to the point when we consider Giga watt batteries where some are in the roof and places where they can be exchanged like forklifts to avoid massive delays charging them even with muti-point charging.

Along with the last comment. Hydrogen is an extremely dangerous gas and this may work out to be another dangerous alternative & people will be driving around in their own personal Hydrogen bomb.

There have been stories in the Sydney Morning Herald about salt batteries which turn out to be sodium ion batteries, with sodium ion replacing lithium ion as the charge carrier. Technical details are scarce but it seems that advantages of the sodium ion battery are that it operates better at low temperatures than lithium ion batteries and charges faster; also cheaper. Disadvantages are that they are heavier and larger for a given capacity so won't be used for vehicles. But this doesn't matter for stationary applications such as large scale storage.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/salt-could-supercharge-storage-batteries-20171013-gz0hr6.html
https://www.smh.com.au/money/investing/lithium-batteries-are-in-hot-demand-can-miner-pilbara-keep-on-trucking-20230314-p5crwa.html

Has anyone proposed a standardised electric vehicle battery pack that could be swapped out easily from under the vehicle with a suitable mechanism and exchanged at a servo in about the same time it would take to fill a tank?

Just like a gas bottle.

This would have the advantage that the spare pack could be charged by the solar panels during the day and swapped over at night.

Re the patent for this idea - you saw it here first!

We used to have a car with an integrated power wheelchair for my late wife that worked that way, except the battery packs were in lift-out canisters on the seat back. The wheelchair looks odd, but it was very practical, easy for Jenny to drive and had enough range to allow local shopping centre trips on a charge. One pack could be charging while the other was in use, or you could drop the 2nd pack into the seat back for increased range. NiCads in those days of course.

Have a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqzmMWblTas&t=34s

Electric car fires cause big problems for fire brigades:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5vDWhMHTwE

Sydney is getting a fleet of electric route buses. The batteries for these look like they will be on the roof just as the cylinder banks are for the buses that run on natural gas. Whether this is for safety reasons or for some other reason I am not sure. The buses will have a range of 500km so I just hope there is an early warning for drivers to head back to the depot or we could see buses lining the streets with no power.

That said, several models were trialled before the NSWG settled on an Australian bus from Custom Denning, probably in light of defects that came with ferries and trams they want any malady that comes with the new buses fixable in a much shorter time.

Ian,

Yes, the concept was considered by truck companies, even here in Australia. The idea runs along these lines:

Along long haul routers e. g. Adelaide - Perth. Truck stops have solar powered recharged battery packs ready and waiting.

Truck pulls in, driver goes into rest room, diner, etc. while fork lift replaces battery pack with a fully charged pack.

Flat battery pack is hooked up to solar charger and when fully charged placed in storage ready for the next truck.

Marvelous idea, quick turn around period, by the time the driver has rested, eaten etc. his truck is ready to go.

In climates where sunlight is not plentiful, charger has alternative power source, nuclear, hydro,wind, etc.

I read this idea about two years ago, I am not aware of any progress since.

As always it is the batteries that are the issue and making them in a standard pattern like electric motors and other batteries.
The larger electric forklifts etc have for decades had roll in roll out batteries. One of the realities is that driving a truck across the Nullarbor, or to Darwin or the Alice is really not on. Even in India & USA where there are regulations. The Pantec goes on rail as does a lot of other stuff, Do check CSX, BNSF & Railfanning to see the miles of them on rail.

Of course, we close rail not build it nor build efficiency into it. We spend more time destroying it, especially in rural areas rather than make it efficient.

I look at Glenrowan: Here is confusion at its best. They are building an edifice bridge across the rail that does not promote fuel efficiency nor an ability to get machinery across the rail. The double staking is not efficiency, it is economy of scale.

The glaring falsehood lies in the fact that the rail from Wangaratta to Glenrowan is one of Australia's steeper uphill gradients an in the early days it was never unusual for the Wang Shunter to push a stalled train up the hill. Efficiency would be to deepen the cutting, even turning it into a tunnel getting rid of the muti-million dollar edifice which will ruin the aesthetics, of one of Australia's historic areas.

The poor history of rail building would be exposed as it was when they turned the Vic. Broad gauge to British standard. The other thing is that all Melbourne Sydney trains would likely need to be put on a freight line from The Rock NSW to Benalla, which is unlikely to be fit for passenger service.

It seems in this country that we are twenty to fifty years behind the rest of the world & spend more time making ourselves tired talking about things rather than building them and there are more barriers than incentives to work.

We note that in 1913 One third of vehicles in NY were electric.

We need a new National Anthem: Advance Australia (or is it "Girt by Sea") where? It’s going to hell in a handbasket.

But what about the salt batteries?