Electric vehicle fire hazards associated with batteries, combustibles and smoke

Abstract

Electrical vehicles are planned to be the future green land traffic means in many places. However, reported vehicle fires or even explosions have raised public safety concern. Fire hazards studies of electric vehicles are commonly focused on ignition of genuine batteries. However, cheap counterfeit batteries of are widely used in electric vehicles in some countries. Counterfeit LIBs are made of unknown battery materials, electrolytes and construction with poor quality control. These counterfeit batteries are not designed for compatibility, not manufactured according to standards, and even not tested. Thus research results based on genuine batteries may not be applicable to counterfeit batteries. Batteries should be taken as a big ignition source for electric ve-hicles and fire hazards could occur during driving, charging or even when not in use. Further, very few works reported the effect of burning of the combustibles of car and smoke to the passengers trapped inside. Fire risk factors should be studied holistically for the entire vehicle to explore practical fire-safe engineering solutions. Key fire as-pects of electric vehicles are pointed out in this paper to alert the society, particularly the authority and professionals handling fire safety.

Keywords

• Counterfeit products
• Electric vehicles
• Fire safety
• Lithium-ion batteries
• Smoke toxicity

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