Electric Vehicles and Potential Transporttation issues

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

We are apparently, in the dawn of the age of Electric Vehicles(?) They seem to be repleat with their own set(s?) of potemtial sets, or sets of transportation issues…

On another site I follow [ The Drive/War Zone ] there is currently, running a story of a larger, car carrier; it is on fire in theorth Sea in the area of the Frisian Islands.

On board are approximately, 3,000 vehicles, with a number of electric vehicles;they are, porportedly,the source of the on-board fire. The fire, has caused the death of one crew member, and the evacuatuon of the rest of the crew;nd is listed as currently out of control.

See linked site here:https://www.thedrive.com/news/cargo-ship-carrying-3000-cars-is-ablaze-in-north-sea-ev-suspected-as-cause

EV fires seem to occure, spontaneosuly, (?) and in some cases, from internal causes(?). Fires that arre difficult to control, and losses that could be catastropic(?)

Not sure how many, if any electric vehicles, are transported by rail,currently ? But, as they grow in numbers;t woukd seem to be inevitable, that they ride the rails.

Their inherant risks,woulk seem to be problematic,for not only the carriers, but also to those who must underwrite their transportation risks.

Will, ultimately, the electric vehicles, have to be shipped without their batteris? And their batteries shipped under hazardous materal regulations?

2

Nasty situation

3

Just saw an article in the fire service press about a luxury EV (forget the brand) that did spontaneously light off in a garage. It was not being charged at the time.

That seems to be the case with most EV fires. Smaller batteries (bikes, scooters) seem to have problems with charging.

We don’t know what caused the fire in the batteries at a solar farm in the next town over - things haven’t cooled enough yet for investigators to get in and look. Talked to the fire chief last night.

The biggest problem with Li-Ion battery fires seems to be that you can’t put them out. Even submerging them requires that they be under water for a day or more.

This puts a bit of a hole in the entire green movement - the solution used to replace internal combustion engines is starting to look worse than the problem. We don’t evacuate for a mile around a “normal” car fire…

4

The average person has no idea about this danger from electric vehicles.

There is a push by the Federal government to electrify the school bus fleet in the US.

It is only a matter of time before one of them goes off while loaded with children.

Many transit bus operations are also being converted to electric vehicles. Thankfully so far all the videos out there of transit buses cooking off are of empty vehicles. So far.

5

As I understand things, EVs do not necessarily catch on fire more often than internal combustion engine vehicles, but they burn far hotter and longer when they do burn, which increases the odds of fire spread in a transport situation. One issue is how much “fuel” or “charge” is present in each vehicle. Cars in autoracks probably don’t carry much fuel. I’m not sure what the minimum charge is that is allowed on an EV.

Flammable Lithium Ion liquid electrolyte, which creates jets of flame when the batteries rupture, is the problem. Industry is working on a new generation of batteries that don’t use liquid electrolyte, which we should see in a few years. In the mean time GM’s new “Ultium” NCMA battery technology, which is also meant to be used in locomotives, may be less of a fire hazard than Li-Ion, but time will tell.

  • Ed Kyle
6

There are a number of concerns with EV fires – one of which is that we can expect more and more of them as the number of EVs that are aging increases.

The first concern is that battery fires usually start in one or a few cells. In a proper structure, they would ‘burn themselves out’ without compromising either adjacent cells or the forced cooling to those cells. Most modern batteries ‘cut a corner’ with this level of inherent integrity.

The second concern is with ‘unrelievable’ stored or stranded charge in a damaged battery (which may already have had fires ‘put out’, but then “spontaneously reignites” as it is being transported, or is being stored unattended. The only way to definitively address this is to provide discharge points and a coherent discharge protocol that allows first responders to discharge all the cells in a battery, whether or not the battery is now pretzel-shaped or radically smashed. You would not do this by bringing ‘discharge terminals’ out to where they could be accessed by the equivalent of jumper cables, unless you have very effective current limitation or clamping on them – which may or may not survive abuse or accident damage.

A typical battery fire is a chemical fire, not ‘rapid unanticipated combustion’. Products of this are caustic as well as toxic. Something I’m not sure of is the consequence of this type of fire weakening the structure of an autorack enough to make it legally prudent to scrap it out.

I suspect the general principle will be to give EVs that are to be shipped by rail a relatively low initial charge, and if possible provide “charging infrastructure” on the railcars or autoracks that could be timed to charge them enough for ‘hostling’ at the staging point, or at a dealer’s, to be fully service-charged for sale (the equivalent of ‘selling a car with a full tank’. The catch is that once the battery has

7

I’ll stick with Toyota hybrids. I think that has been the sound approach to adjusting to environmental needs we face. We’ve got to walk before we can run.

8

Our neighborhood just had a house burn down from a Mercedes catching fire in the garage last week. It was an electric car, and less than a mile from my house

9

I agree. I can see myself getting a hybrid as my next vehicle, but I’ll wait quite awhile before I get a BEV.

10

Our incident involved two trailers full of Li-Ion batteries - many times the mass of an EV battery. The shelter in place (not an evacuation - I was equating it with a “regular” hazmat incident) was only in place until monitoring could be done, at which time it was lifted (about 4 hours later). “An abundance of caution” is probably an appropriate term.

You may see similar reactions to EV and other such battery fires in the future.

That said - EV fires are a relatively new phenomenon, one we haven’t fully learned to appreciate just yet. The chief danger is downwind. These things don’t explode in a catastrophic manner that would require evacuations. But the smoke is hardly healthy. In a case such as the EV fire mentioned (I suspect it was the same incident), the smoke from the batteries will be mixed pretty well with the smoke from the structure (not very healthy in and of itself), and may well be lifted by thermal currents to a point where it will dissipate with minimal effects on the populace.

From Nature.com:

[quote]
At elevated temperature the fluorine content of the electrolyte and, to some extent, other parts of the battery such as the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF) binder in the electrodes, may form gases such as hydrogen fluoride HF, phosphorus pentafluoride (PF