Built -in fire extinguishers can take battery explosions

Batteries enhanced with a polymer material that riders fire -serving chemicals at high temporary are significantly smaller like flames. This technique can increase the safety of battery-dependent machines, such as electric cars and medical devices.

“Our approaches improve the safety of mainstream liquid lithium batteries,” says Ying Zhang at the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “It’s like emerging with a safety valve – these chemicals that stifle flammable gas before they can explode, which helps prevent fire.”

Zhang and her colleagues created and tested the flame retardant polymer material in a prototype lithium metal battery. Such batteries are currently in limited use, but the next generation versions are requests to replace the batteries in electric cars and portable electronic devices. This is because lithium metal can store 10 times as much energy as popular lithium-ion batteries using pure lithium, rather than graphite, in the negative electrode.

The researchers exposed the prototype battery and a standard lithium metal battery for gradually warmer tempters, staring from 50 ° C when external temperatures rose above 100 ° C, both batteries experienced overheating – but the special polymer material of the prototype began to break down automatically, rewarding chemicals that act as “microscopic fire.”

In addition to 120 ° C, the standard battery without security is overheated to 1000 ° C within 13 minutes and burst into flames. But under the same conditions, the top temperature of the prototype battery reached only 220 ° C without any resulting fire or explosion.

This “innovative material scientific approach” can reduce the risk of battery fires or overheating, not only in lithium metal batteries, but also in certain lithium-ion batteries and lithium sulfur batteries, says Jagjit Nanda at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. It can lead to safer batteries, especially to electric vehicle or even electric aircraft, he says.

The brand support technology would integrate well into existing battery production as a “short-term security upgrade, while the industry clean long-term solutions” involving alternative battery design and chemists, Zhang says. Still, injection of the polymer material into batteries would require some reintroduction of manufacturing processes, she says.