The 2024 Battery Safety Workshop takes place at the University of South Carolina from Aug 5-6, 2024. Since 2022, this annual workshop has provided an informative and inclusive forum to discuss state-of-the-art research progress in the battery safety area. Attendees include scientists, researchers, and engineers in academia and industry to inspire collaborative and synergic efforts toward solving battery safety issues.
The Electrochemical Society is a proud sponsor of the workshop.
Learn more
Register for Gerald Morrison’s March 27 seminarThe ECS Detroit Section invites you to Gerald Morrison‘s in-person presentation, “Enabling Online EIS for Improved Battery Safety and Better Performance in Electric Vehicles” on March 27 at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.
Register nowWhen the Washington Post publicized the launch of North America’s first all-electric, zero-emissions boats, they referred to an authoritative article on battery safety in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. The introduction of two electric Maid of the Mist tour vessels at Niagara Falls heralds a new era in maritime travel. The boats, which run on dual banks of lithium ion batteries charged with hydro-electric power supplied by the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, are a zero-emission operation. But are their Li-ion batteries safe? (more…)
Lithium-ion batteries power a vast majority of the world’s portable electronics, but the magnification of recent safety incidents have some looking for new ways to keep battery-related hazards at bay. The U.S. Navy is one of those groups, with chemists in the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) unveiling a new battery, which they say is both safe and rechargeable for applications such as electric vehicles and ships.
“We keep having too many catastrophic news stories of lithium-ion batteries smoking, catching fire, exploding,” says Debra Rolison, head of NRL’s advanced electrochemical materials section and co-author of the recently published paper. “There’ve been military platforms that have suffered severe damage because of lithium-ion battery fires.”
Once example of such damage came in 2008, when an explosion and fire caused by a lithium-ion battery damaged the Advanced SEAL Delivery Vehicle 1 at its base in Pearl Harbor.
While generally safe when manufactured properly, lithium-ion batteries host an organic liquid which is flammable if the battery or device gets too hot.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has recently been in the headlines for safety concerns pertaining to its lithium-ion battery. Now, a lawsuit filed in California claims that the issues extend beyond the Note 7, and that many other generations of Samsung smartphones “pose a risk of overheating, fire, and explosion.”
While Samsung claims that the Li-ion safety issues are isolated to only the Note 7, researchers in the field of energy storage are still looking for a way to develop an efficient, non-combustible battery. CBS recently stopped by the University of Maryland to discuss just that with ECS member Erich Wachsman.
In an effort to build safer batteries, Wachsman and his group at the University of Maryland are focusing their research efforts on lithium conducting ceramic discs, which can handle thousands of degrees without any issues.
“Because it’s ceramic, it’s actually not flammable,” says Wachsman, director of the university’s Energy Research Center. “You cannot burn ceramic.”
(MORE: Listen to Wachsman discuss his work in water and sanitation.)
Since the rise of Li-ion battery safety in the news, Wachsman’s research has received more attention from industry. He and his group are currently working on scaling up the technology.
Image: Mike Mozart/Flickr
Electronic cigarettes have paved a path for smokers to get their nicotine fix in a safer way. However, with recent news reports of the devices exploding into bursts of flames, many consumers now wary of the safety concerns.
E-cigarettes are relatively simple devices. Powered by a battery, an internal heating element vaporizes the liquid solution in the cartridge. But for a New York teen, the process wasn’t as simple as he expected.
According to a report by USA Today, the teen pressed the button to activate his e-cigarette and it exploded in his hands like “a bomb went off.”
Investigators expect that the device’s lithium-ion battery malfunctioned. Li-ion batteries, however, are the driving force behind personal electronics, electric vehicles, and even have potential in large-scale grid storage. So why are devices like hoverboards and e-cigarettes experiencing such issues with Li-ion battery safety when so many other applications consider the energy dense, long-life battery a non-safety hazard?
