ELI5- Are lithium batteries in electric cars more dangerous or hazardous than a gasoline car? If so, why or why not?
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Fire is a chemical reaction that outputs a lot of heat.
For a gas car, the gasoline is being used to create little explosions inside the car to push a cylinder that drives the wheels. So Gasoline is deliberately flammable. However, oxygen is part of the chemical reaction. So how flammable is controlled by the mixture of Gasoline and Oxygen. This makes a Gas car fire easier to start there is a lot of flammable liquid around and to stop (stopping the oxygen).
For an electric car, the battery is a chemical reaction but a controlled one. The only way to start a fire is to pierce the barrier that controls how fast the reaction goes. Once the reaction is out of control you get a fire. Inside the battery, there is some flammable liquid, that helps the reaction occur so that can catch fire but since it isn’t designed to, it is much harder to do so. The battery chemical reaction does not require oxygen, the only way to stop it, is to slow it down, usually by cooling it down. So it is both a lot harder to start an electric car fire it is also a lot harder to stop.
It is possible to design electric car batteries that cannot catch fire. the company BYD already has, the materials they use catch fire at a higher temperature and their batteries can passively cool faster preventing the battery from getting out of control. Other methods involve reducing or removing the amount of flammable liquid in the battery or adding chlorides, bromides or fluorides to the battery, hard to explain but they slow the process of fire down but not the battery processes.
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