133: Managing EV Fires at Sea with Elena Funk and Magnus Arvidson

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everybody, welcome to the Far Sense show. There is no other topic in the podcast that would create more attention than electric vehicle fires. And because it's the Christmas episode, I have a Christmas present for you. I have a very interesting episode on electric vehicle fires. I have invited Elena Funk from DBI and Magnus Avidsson from RISE. Both of them were participants in projects carried by their institutions. Elena was doing a project called the Elbas and Magnus was doing Lash Fire with RISE. Both of those projects were oriented on electric vehicle fires on decks of boats, row row ships and ferries. So something that already electrified my audience in the summer, where a large boat burned down at the coast of Netherlands, and together with Bogdan, we have discussed the fire safety of ships. And when we take it a little deeper, both of those projects were looking into how we can mitigate electric vehicle fires in that setting, and this is the most relevant for the civil engineers as well, because the shipping deck is very similar to the setting you would find in a car park. So a very, very relevant topic. We are discussing multiple tools used to suppress, mitigate the fires in electric vehicles. We talk about how the projects were designed, what they've done, what they found out, what surprised them and how they evaluate the performance of the tools tested. So ton of knowledge, ton of useful stuff for you. Today it's Chris's episode electric vehicle fires. Let's go. Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Vojci Wimczynski and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants, a multi-hour, winning, independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Ofr is UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Internationally, its work ranges from the Antarctic to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to a number of projects across Africa. Ofr is calling all graduates, as it is opening the graduate application scheme for another year, inviting prospective colleagues to join their team from September 2024. By taking this opportunity, you'll be provided with fantastic practical immersion in the far engineering and unique opportunity to work with the leading technical experts in the field, while learning the skills critical to become a trusted consultant to clients. This opportunity is tailored just for you and if you would like to take it, please visit OFRConsultantscom for further details and instructions on how to apply. Hello everybody, welcome to the Firesize Show. I'm here today joined by Elena Funk from DBI hey Elena, hi, what's your great to have you in the show and also Magnus Arvidsson from Rise Hello, magnus, good to have you in the show. Hello, hi, and I think that connects you too is your passion for burning down electric vehicles and trying to suppress them, which I find very valuable. This is something that everyone is asking about how do we deal with vehicles that are burning? You both have participated in projects done in your institution, elena. For you it was Project Elbas, for Magnus it was Project Lashfire. I think they both had quite similar objectives, but perhaps we can quickly walk our audience over them. So, elena, let's start with you. Tell me in few words about Project Elbas, and what was it about?

Speaker 2: 4:02

Sure Project, elbas project was about extinguishing fires in electric vehicles and it included the tests that we're going to talk about. But it was actually a quite larger project where we holistically look at procedures on board of ferries, how they do in case of fire. We looked at training of personnel for the fire, the fire drills, and we have also modeled fires in three cases that we chose with our partners. We got money from Danish Maritime Fund to do that and we had Danish shipping companies together with us DFDS, sienna, molflinian, scandlines and together with them we chose some ferries that we could look at, visit, question, ask people how they do and learn and then model and come up with tests basically, very shortly. That was the project.

Speaker 1: 5:03

As someone who's planning a trip to Stockholm and Copenhagen with a ferry from Poland, I appreciate the rush for safety on those ships sponsored by the companies out there. Very interesting, and Magnus, the Lashfire project. So tell me what was the scope of your project?

Speaker 3: 5:20

The Lashfire project was a European Union project that started in 2019 and it was finalized this year, so it was a four-year project and we looked at technical basis for the revision of international IMR regulations with the objective to improve fire prevention on your rubberships, and we had a huge number of different partners in Europe that participated and it was divided into several different work packages. We looked at effective mania operations, we looked at ignition prevention, extinguishment, we looked at what we called inherently safe design, detection and also containment on all fire. So we looked at improving fire safety on rubberships from several different aspects, and my focus was extinguishment, and extinguishment. For me here was using fixed installed fire protection systems.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Cool. So rubberships, if anyone is not up to the technicalities, these are ships that are used to carry passenger vehicles. Ferries are ships that are used to carry passenger vehicles and passengers with them, so both of you are touching, in a way, similar subject of ships transporting vehicles. How important that is. We had a not a very nice reminder earlier this year with a massive fire on a ship near the Netherlands coast, and I actually had a podcast episode to some extent covering the IMO standards and the general approach to fire safety on the sea with Bogdan a few episodes ago. I'll link to that in the show notes and also, even though your projects were quite wide in this co, both of you have ended burning down electric vehicles to figure out what type of a new hazard they are. So let's go a little more in depth into burning electric vehicles for now. So, elena, if you could quickly characterize how have you constructed your experiment, what was the main objective and perhaps the main variables of your study?

Speaker 2: 7:43

Sure. So in general we looked at three different types of car decks and we looked at the closed, semi-closed and open one. But here for the rest we chose on this semi-opened. So we took two 40 feet containers, cut them open, placed them aside and placed metal shit on the top. So we made sort of a long compartment where we inside placed nine vehicles with an EV in the center and we made sure we start the fire from a battery by short circuiting the battery in most of the cases. In one case we both short circuited and overcharged the battery, and one case the car arrived late so we used the pull fire underneath.

Speaker 1: 8:27

So the setup was like one electric vehicle in the middle of your shipping container space, surrounded with different cars, right.

Speaker 2: 8:38

Yeah, that were the internal combustion engine vehicles. We used scrap cars, simple cars, emptied everything from them, like the fuel I mean, and placed around this electric car.

Speaker 1: 8:52

So I assume the point of this setup is to figure out some sort of fire spread between the vehicles or to what extent the safety strategies you implement were successful in preventing that spread.

Speaker 2: 9:03

The fire spread is something we looked at, but the main goal was to test different extinguishment techniques.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Okay.

Speaker 2: 9:10

That's something I didn't mention before is what we wanted to do together with our partners. We wanted to invite the crew that would be responsible fighting the fire on board of such a ferry so that they could participate in testing different tools and seeing how it is to use them and also finding some simple solutions together with them that they could later on bring with them and use them later. But we also, of course, look at the fire spread because, as I mentioned, we modeled fires on these ferries, so we were very interested in what the ignites first and how fast the fire spreads if it does.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Okay, you're right. You have mentioned that one of the goals of the entire project was to figure out the procedures on board of the ferry, so it makes sense that you were looking into things that the crew can use in case of fire emerging, to close it up. Can you tell me what types of solutions were you checking out?

Speaker 2: 10:10

Yeah, we tested the blanket, the so-called extinguishing lens and the punching device. These are the direct injection devices, where you basically put the water inside the battery, and so-called water curtains of two different types. The last one was the low pressure water mist.

Speaker 1: 10:29

As in a fixed system built inside the deck.

Speaker 2: 10:33

Yes, exactly that's the fixed system. So we had a company that usually installs such water mists on board of ferries come and look at our setup and then design how we replace the the nozzles, and they helped us.

Speaker 1: 10:50

And in your case it was a manually activated system, not an automatic system.

Speaker 2: 10:54

Yeah, we activated after the detection manually.

Speaker 1: 10:59

Yeah, Okay, cool. So we have an overview of Albus ship containers built into something that is similar to a shipping deck, one of the three that you've investigated. Four types of fire safety devices blankets, extinguishing lances, punching devices, water curtains and low pressure water mist that were compared, all in a setting where you had nine vehicles with the middle one burning. I hope I got it correct. Yeah, you got it correct. I'm cheating because I'm looking at the paper you know, but people don't know that. And, magnus, for a project, lashfire, and experiments that you have carried, tell me what did the setup look like and what were the variables that you were looking in.

Speaker 3: 11:40

Yeah, I can start off by saying that the background is that these spaces on board Roro cargo and Roro passengers ships. They are protected by a fixed installed Sprintler system and the technology that is used on board ships is drencher systems. Drencher system is basically a water spray system that is divided into different zones, so these zones are manually activated by the crew in case of fire and the nozzles are installed at the ceiling and each zone typically covers the full width of the ship and the length of the zone is 20 meters. And the background for my test was a concern raised by Stena, one of the partners in the Lashfire project. They had a concern that these drencher systems, or they wanted to know basically if the drencher system is effective also if there's an electric vehicle fighter. So that was the starting point for these tests and the tests themselves were conducted in one of the five test halls at twice in Boros and we tested one vehicle, one car, at a time. We started to fight on car at a time and one of the key things here was that we measured the heat release rate. We have a large calorimeter where we could measure the heat release rate. So we installed, put the cars in the test hall and we had that water spray system above five meters. Above and above that we had the collection of the calorimeter. We did a total of four tests and we had two pairs of vehicles and the intent here was to try to find a battery electrical vehicle and an internal combustion engine vehicle as similar as possible. So we had a straightforward comparison of all the performance of the drencher system. Having sort of two pairs where each pair of cars was as similar as possible.

Speaker 1: 13:52

So from your perspective, the internal combustion engine vehicle hazard is known and recognized because there is an IMO standard on how do you test the drencher systems and how you assign the water flows and the separation between the nozzles and stuff like that. I've been to Baltic Fire Lab and I've seen one of those tests in my eyes, so it is a very interesting approach. However, the battery electric vehicle fire were to some sort, an unknown because it was not covered yet by IMO standard. So the point was to figure out if they are worse and if how much. That's the test.

Speaker 3: 14:25

Yes, exactly, and we wanted to do this. I mean the main difference between these two types of cars is the drive train. Basically, I mean it's either a fuel tank and a regular combustion engine or it's a battery pack and an electric, one or more electrical motors. So in these tests we wanted to include the fire in either the fuel tank or in the battery pack at the very early stage. So that's the main difference, sort of. So to do that for the internal combustion engine vehicles was actually gasoline-fueled cars. So we started the fire by drilling a hole in the fuel tank, we put the plug in and then we filled the fuel tank to 90% of the full capacity and when we started the test we basically disconnected the rubber plug and ignited the outflow of fuel and the outflow of gasoline with a torch.

Speaker 1: 15:29

So it was kind of like a failure of the tank scenario.

Speaker 3: 15:32

Yes, exactly, exactly. And for the battery electrical vehicles we used a nail and we punctured the battery pack from underneath by using a nail, and to be able to do that, we had actually to make a small opening in the protection shield underneath the battery pack, but we penetrated with a nail underneath and that started in the fire.

Speaker 1: 15:57

For the listeners, because you are hearing an audio description of what happened, and Magnus was kind enough to send me pictures from the test. And what he kindly calls the nail is actually a fist-sized device that breaks through the battery. It's absolutely giant and it's powered by some sort of pneumatic device that you normally use to lift the cars in the car shop, so it's not like a nail that you would use to construct your home. It is a massive device that does massive damage to the battery and it seems a reliable way to set vehicles on fire, just as drilling a hole in a fuel tank and releasing the gasoline from it is Very interesting. Thank you, magnus, for bringing me to Dignition, because I also wanted to have, before we go into suppression, I wanted to have a really good discussion about Dignition with you. Elena, tell me about how have you ignited the vehicles? You've mentioned something about overcharging and short circuiting them before, so can we go into details?

Speaker 2: 17:04

How are we setting them on fire? We overcharged one battery and short circuited, and most of all we short circuited. So the plan was that if we short circuited we wait and then we get the fire. But that's not what happened. A very first test, we got to wait for 40 minutes with some weak smoke coming out and nothing really happening. Despite that, we even went in in the compartment and opened the back of the car where the battery was flicking. That's pretty risky, it is, but it was just off-gassing for a very long time and we need just a blanket. We didn't want to test it on the slight smoke, so we needed a fire, so we used the accelerator. In that case we did as I said, used both overcharge and shorting, and that's where we got a very fast action that we didn't expect. We were able to do it once to equipment we used to overcharge broke down. That would be very interesting to see if we would get repeatable results with these two types of abuse battery abuse, because we got really fast ignition without almost any off-gassing of the battery in this case.

Speaker 1: 18:18

And when you were just short circuiting them, was it a typical scenario that you would see some off-gassing then as a fire growth phase where you were using also accelerant you mentioned yeah we would normally see battery off-gassing for a long time.

Speaker 2: 18:35

So I think that if everything is closed in the car as you know, that's an important parameter then what you will see is a very boring scenario. So the goal was to test different extinguishment techniques. We did later on, at later stage, messed up with the situation and helped a little.

Speaker 1: 18:55

I can imagine that there's not much action happening if the car is not burning. So if you want to assess the extinguishing, you probably want to have the fire there. One interesting point okay, so Magnus was violating the cars really badly aggressively, shooting nails through them, drilling holes in the tank. So let's say mechanically introduced failure. In your case it was electrical failure. One thing I would need to have clear I mean this type of behavior like short circuits and overcharging. Primarily, I mean the battery management system would be something that kind of protects the vehicle from behavior like that. Did you have to go around the battery management system to actually introduce those failures?

Speaker 2: 19:38

Yeah, we had to go around that. We had to disconnect and short it and then safely make sure that we don't do it, that we do it at the time zero when the test starts. Okay, so we have a fire investigator who used to work at Tesla who knew how to do it, and he helped us with this process in all the cases.

Speaker 1: 20:01

Sounds like a dangerous man to have around your electric vehicles at home. So now let's talk about what happened after. So I guess in both projects the ones the cars were ignited the fires were growing and I have seen some heat release rate plots from Magnus and they show a rapid growth of the fire, as I would expect from a vehicle with a failed tank or a violated battery. Elena, you saw your presentation at IFSS. I saw quite large fires that you got. So let's assume at this point and discussion on the fire growth and development of fires and electric vehicles, that you eventually got all of your cars in your experiments to be fully involved in fires. And let's move to the most interesting part, the one that is very novel that you both bring into the table of the fire science, which is extinguishing actions and suppression. So perhaps let's start with Elena and Project Albas. You have mentioned four techniques used to control the fires in the cars. If you could describe how were they applied and what were the outcomes of using those, please?

Speaker 2: 21:12

When we tested the blanket we had to go around the neighboring vehicles, because configuration that we tried to mimic was how exactly the cars are standing on board of a car deck on the ferry and they standing very close to each other. So the crew or the firefighters that tested the blanket they would go around the vehicles and place the blanket around and then make sure that it's above the EV and what we saw was that the battery temperature would slightly go down when you just apply the blanket, but that will restart growing after a while.

Speaker 1: 21:52

So by blanket you mean a giant sized fire blanket that we would normally use in the kitchen to put out the pan, and in this case it's a really giant device that people have to go in, drop over the vehicle and technically the vehicle is sealed outside. But you were measuring the stuff that's happening on the battery and there you see what you've just described the temperature going down and up. Okay, very interesting.

Speaker 2: 22:15

Yeah, there is a company producing special type of blankets to use for car fires, so they are larger and they are sold in different types. We tested the one time used blanket in that test.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Okay. So as the temperatures went up, have you observed steel growing fire and indications of fire spread between vehicles?

Speaker 2: 22:37

That's the thing when you apply the blanket you don't want the fire to already spread to the neighboring cars, right? So if you applied early enough, then you can really contain. And what we saw? The temperatures around the car go down. So in our test we saw that they went significantly down and we could keep them at about 100. And that's what also mentioned when they tested, because normally, you know, they train on artificial smoke, but here they got to actually go in where the car was on fire and try what they already have on board of the ferries to test themselves and they said OK, we felt how much less heated it was.

Speaker 1: 23:21

How difficult was it to apply the blanket Like? Was it problematic to put it on, or they were trained to do that?

Speaker 2: 23:28

You need to train a bit, but I would say it's fairly simple.

Speaker 1: 23:31

OK, it's more about detecting the fire and getting to the place where the fire is, because the ship can be massive and there's a lot of fire.

Speaker 2: 23:39

If you imagine where you park your car, can you think of how many cars there can be, sometimes when it's very, very much. So they are not planning to really use the blanket in such situations. They will very carefully evaluate before they ever come in. So there are situations where a car deck would be half empty, for example, where you have some chemicals you transport or some sensitive equipment or something. So they want to have blankets not to really. They tested to try it on EV, but they would switch on the drencher system that Magnus will talk more about and that will be their main strategy. But they wanted to test and to try because they invested in blankets on board and they wanted to know how it is to use it. And, yeah, it's fairly simple.

Speaker 1: 24:31

Very good, very good, very interesting bit of knowledge for extinguishing lenses and punching devices Like how does one apply that and what did they do?

Speaker 2: 24:41

So the way you apply it is you need a professional firefighter and training is much more demanding here and it's also a heavy job. I would say you would need two people for e-lands and you would maybe hold one firefighter would hold it and another would use a hammer to hit it in the battery. So imagine you need to know where the battery is.

Speaker 1: 25:04

Okay.

Speaker 2: 25:05

When the crew saw all of these aspects that have to come together, they of course said that's something not for us, they are not trained to use such tools. But when we tested that, we could see that, for that type of battery at least, that we successfully extinguished and we saw no reignitions of the battery in this case.

Speaker 1: 25:27

Why would the type of battery matter? What was so special about this one?

Speaker 2: 25:31

So I would be really careful to say that it would work everywhere. The type of battery matters because of the thickness of protection. Like Minus mentioned, they had to drill a hole. The thickness would be different If you have a car. That is, a high-end car, more expensive, usually very well protected, what we see now. We cannot penetrate it Because firefighters use this tool in Denmark today in normal fires around here on land. So they announced starting to develop a new similar tool together with the Danish company to make sure that they can breach the thickness of the metal that is introduced.

Speaker 1: 26:11

I've heard about batteries becoming a structural part of the vehicle now. So if they're a structural part, it means you are not supposed to break it easily. Otherwise the car is faulty and crushes. So I can imagine just sticking a lance into a battery not being an easy job, Especially if you have to know where it is, where it exactly is located in your vehicle, and that probably changes from a vehicle to a vehicle.

Speaker 2: 26:37

There is another very important aspect that I didn't mention. It's that you need to actually paste to fill it with water. So if your battery design would change and it will be insulated fully and there will be no space for water to cool the battery, then it would not work. And also, what if it's separated in the design inside so you actually use that in one location and you may be introduced to fire instead in that location, so you have to move around. There's a lot of aspects there that you have to be careful when you use such tool.

Speaker 1: 27:12

But in essence, where you successfully applied water near the battery inside the vehicle, it would take the temperatures down. The fire would die and you would not see a ignition.

Speaker 2: 27:23

It was very effective. The users less were in the battery. We tested, the temperature went down, so it was really a really good tool.

Speaker 1: 27:33

I would say a successful one. Next one you mentioned water curtains, so can you describe what they are and how does firefighter use them?

Speaker 2: 27:42

So the water curtains are portable water curtains. So imagine you have a system of pipes with nozzles that you can put in between the vehicles. People on board call it like boundary cooling device. So you basically want to push it in between the vehicles, switch the water on so it cools down, prevents the fire from spreading from the ignition vehicle, and then come to port and get help from the firefighters.

Speaker 1: 28:11

So it's like a water blanket. It doesn't do things inside the vehicle, it just prevents the fire from affecting neighboring vehicles.

Speaker 2: 28:21

It's a clinch and in our tests the companies tested devices. They were continuously improving them. So in one test we saw that when we applied this device too late, when the fire managed to spread, then the device was not able to do much. Fire continued raging and we went almost to burnout. But in another case, when applied early enough, when the fire is still at one vehicle, it was effective.

Speaker 1: 28:50

I see a pattern emerging in here. Time is a very important variable. Exactly, and to close up on Project Elba, the last thing you've tested was fixed extinguishing system low pressure water mist. So this is not something people would go into the compartment with them, but something that is already pre-installed in their building A system similar to what Magnus will speak about in a few seconds that is activated. So what have you observed with water mist, perhaps comparing it to the hand-operated devices we were talking about previously?

Speaker 2: 29:24

So what we saw is that it was very effective in cooling the temperatures down around the electric vehicle and the crew that was observing the test with us. They really liked to see that, because that's where they don't need to come in and risk their lives.

Speaker 1: 29:42

So this was very effective. Have you seen any effects inside the vehicle? Or, again, the battery was able to develop itself because it's protected from the water.

Speaker 2: 29:51

We could see that temperature on the battery went down during the application. Everybody, even underlining that the battery is protected. It is protected, but we do see some temperature drop when we use this kind of water pressure.

Speaker 1: 30:07

You've mentioned something about the ventilation before. So Windows 2, this vehicle were closed, or were they open when you were doing the tests?

Speaker 2: 30:14

Yeah, the first test, when we just started, we had everything closed and then we started opening, really because we wanted to get.

Speaker 1: 30:23

For the fire growth okay.

Speaker 2: 30:24

Yeah. We needed a real fire to test these devices. And I think in case of the water mist, where we tested just the water mist and nothing else, because we also had three tests in the end of the project where we mixed different techniques. So when we tested just the water mist I think we had there. We had a possibility for water to go in actually inside the car.

Speaker 1: 30:49

Very interesting observations. Thank you, lanna, for summarizing Project Albus, and now we can move to Lashfire and Magnus. So in your case, to iterate, you were testing electrical vehicles and internal combustion vehicles very similar to each other, in a setting that is representative for RORO decks under a hood, measuring heat release rates.

Speaker 3: 31:15

Now, we used what we call a drainage system, which is a no pressure system. Basically, water spray nozzles, so the operating pressure of the system is quite low. It's like 1.3 bar. Only that's the type of system that typically is used on Bordicea. We used to design density, a water flow rate corresponding to 10 liters per minute per square meter, which is the sort of required density for ceiling heights of 5 meters. What was simulated?

Speaker 1: 31:50

Tell me how have you decided when you have activated the systems and what happened after the activation.

Speaker 3: 31:57

Yes, I mean. The intent here was to start the application of water at a similar heat release rate. So we decided beforehand that when the fire reaches 1.5 megawatt we will start the application of water. So that was decided beforehand and we used that approach for all four tests. However, the time was quite different and that relates of course to the fire growth rate on the fires. And for the gasoline fuel cars the fire growth rate was very rapid. Then that fuel, then gasoline fuel, then that goes out from the tank, that will spread out and it will drain quite quickly at a large spill fire. In this particular case we had a tray underneath the cars so it prevented that spill to grow very large. The size of that tray was 15 square meters, so the spill fire could be larger than 15 square meters?

Speaker 1: 33:01

What were the sizes of the peaks of heat release rate from the spills?

Speaker 3: 33:06

As a matter of fact we start for the gasoline fuel cars. Then that spills spread out and eventually after a few minutes we believe that the fuel tanks are ruptured. So the spill out was quite large. So in the first test we approached eight megawatts. So we started the application of water but the fire continued to grow to peak about eight megawatts. But the spill out, the fuel is consumed, so gradually the fire size will be reduced as the fuel is consumed. So it was quite a short peak, not quite a short period, talking about three, four minutes of all.

Speaker 1: 33:50

This is a very interesting observation because a lot of people would say the main difference between electrical vehicle fires and internal combustion engine fires would be the way that the batteries ignite and they immediately give insanely large heat release rates. You see, in internal combustion engine vehicles you also can have these huge peaks very early If there is a tank failure and the release of accelerant, the gasoline into the environment. And I think your colleagues from RISE in their previous test I had Roland Bishop in the podcast a long time ago. We've discussed that they also observed a very rapid growth of the fires when the tanks were affected. So you were triggering your systems at one and a half megawatt. Please let me go back to Elena, because I didn't ask you when you were designing Elena when to apply your solutions in those tests.

Speaker 2: 34:41

So Pence. The overall goal was to wait out. If we have a fire and if it started, that's because the procedures on board of the ferry as such that crew. It will take time for the crew to master, prepare, get dressed. So they told us it would take us 10 minutes. We were most cases, if we got things going waiting depending on when it started, except one case when the fire started so fast that it caught us by surprise. So there we had to start the firefighting early. And then also, if you think about the direct injection tools, the test showed to us that you first want to extinguish the fire in the cabin and then come in and inject the water. So, that would be like a last of your firefighting. So it depends on the tool, but in general we wanted to wait out and sort of simulate on how it happens on board of ferry.

Speaker 1: 35:40

So it was not just a single trigger point like for Magnus you passed this value and you release. It was more like procedure oriented, figured out together with the ferry people who know their stuff and were actually a pit participant. Okay, that makes sense. And for what to miss? You had what to miss. How did you choose the time when to press the button? They don't need to master to press the button, right.

Speaker 2: 36:02

So here's the same. You see, once the fire is detected. We had smoke detectors installed. We waited for 10 minutes and then switched it on.

Speaker 1: 36:12

Okay, so you accounted for the time for a person to go in, confirm that there is a fire, come back and then activate in a way. Okay, thank you, magnus, coming back to you, one and a half megawatts, you were triggering your drencha system and tell me what happened in both cases of electrical and internal combustion engine vehicles. No, please start with. What were the peaks and the fire growth you saw in battery electric vehicle, because I stopped you in the middle of a very interesting For the gasoline fuel cars we started at one and a half megawatts but the fire continued to grow.

Speaker 3: 36:48

So on the first car it went to eight megawatts. For the second car it went to about five megawatts. The reason for the smaller sized fire was that the fuel tank of that second car was smaller, so the amount of fuel was smaller. For the battery electrical vehicles the fire growth rate was significantly slower. As a matter of fact the fire started quite soon after we had penetrated the battery pack with the nail the first pack we saw sort of flames, basically immediately. For the second type of car we saw flames, we saw dripping of melted plastic and it took a little time. It took two, three minutes before we saw a flaming combustion and we saw flames coming out from the battery pack. But for both cases, the battery electric vehicles fires were where the fire growth rate was much slower. In these cases we started application of water in the first test after 12 minutes. In the second test it was after 16 minutes and that was the moment you reached one and a half megawatts. Yes, that's when we reached one and a half megawatts For the gasoline powered cars. It took just a minute to reach that threshold. So the fire growth rate was much slower for the battery electrical vehicles. And also when we started the application of water for the battery electrical vehicles we saw some degree of fire suppression. We suppressed fire, but that was of course basically the part of the fire. Where water could reach and cool down the fire. The fire continued to burn. That was obvious from the measurements that the fire continued to burn inside the battery pack. For the first of the battery electrical vehicles we saw the fire go up and down and that is most likely the reason and the indication of fire spread from module to module. And for that particular car we called it PED1,. That car was sort of a dedicated well built on a dedicated electrical battery electrical vehicle platform. So the modules, all modules, are in the bottom part of the vehicle and sort of side by side and we can clearly see from the data when the fire sort of spreads from one module to the other module. The fire goes up and then it goes down for a small, certain period of time and then it goes up again and down again.

Speaker 1: 39:35

What kind of threshold it's reaching, how big it becomes.

Speaker 3: 39:39

I think it was in the order of three, almost two and a half, three megawatts when this occurred. Okay, the interesting thing was that during the 30 minutes discharge period because we discharged water for 30 minutes during this time the full battery pack burned down. That was very clear in the first test. So the second test, though, the car that we call BEV2, it looked very similar, but it was that that car is not built on a dedicated platform, it's built on a modular platform. So the battery modules are not sort of in all cases sort of side by side, they are separated a little bit. There's one pack basically below the rear seat of the car and an actual bit, so they're spread around the car okay. And there's a certain distance between parts of the battery pack. So for that car we think that water at some time reached down to the part of the battery pack and sort of kept that partly under control, because when we turned off the application of water we could tell that there was after some minute there was a battery sort of pack fire going on, sort of. So the first test, the full battery pack burned out during application of water and in the second test we partly burned out the battery pack and we believe that the water sort of that came from the Drencia system that went down into the battery pack probably through the windows. The windows broke in the car and probably wanted to penetrate down to the battery pack and prevent the development of part of the battery pack.

Speaker 1: 41:33

If you have a three megawatt fire, such damage is very likely to happen. And you mentioned you were applying water for 30 minutes. So one was the reason for this duration and two what happened when you turned the water off.

Speaker 3: 41:48

Yeah, the reason was two actually. First of all we wanted to see to what extent the fire sort of redevelop after the application of water. So by doing that we could get an indication of the performance you could say of the Drencia system. Because it was quite clear that the Drencia system kept the fires under control and as soon as we turned off the water we had fire development again and fire regrow. In three of the cases it was basically immediately. In one of the cases it took some time before the fires sort of really got going again. So the fact that that occurred, you could say that is an indication that the Drencia system, the water spray system, really keeps the fire down. It prevented combustibles to burn to quite a large extent actually. So that was one reason. The second reason was that by burning the cars out completely we could first of all we could get the measure from the test data where we can sort of see the total heat release during the entire test. So we could compare that total heat release with sort of pre-burn test by using other cars. And the other reason what was burning out the cars makes the scrapping afterwards much easier. It was easy for the car to keep with the fire, no risk for fire reignition or anything like that. Everything basically burned out during that.

Speaker 1: 43:33

You couldn't see it. But as soon as he said that, I smiled, elena smiled. We were all working in fire laboratories and we understand you. It makes life so much easier if you have to work with scrap knots or something that can reignite. But to close the loop, the reignition appeared in both internal combustion engine the vehicle fires and in battery electric vehicle fires, at different times, but in all scenarios the fire would to some extent return and then burn through the vehicle. No longer eight megawatt peaks, just a few megawatts one, two, but it would simply continue, right? Is this correct?

Speaker 3: 44:11

That's fully correct. So this phase of the fire we had peak heat raise rates in the order of a couple of megawatts, but still quite severe fires. But I mean we were to a certain degree we were happy seeing that. As I said, that proved that the Drencher system worked quite well, sort of keeping these fire control.

Speaker 1: 44:35

Elena, I've done my homework and I noted in your test one with the fire blanket and test three with the extinguishing lens. You also have observed some sort of recognition after a longer period of time. So if you can tell me your experiences with this behavior, yeah, we saw, as you said, few reignitions.

Speaker 2: 44:55

I mean experiences as such that we thought that we've done the job and we are ready and then suddenly it reignites and we have to come in again and use the tool again or use the hose with water to extinguish. From this safe experience and it was no big fire, but still we had to make sure that we extinguished fully and it doesn't reignite. We also, when we had this blanket, we tried to cover the car while it was still not sent to, scrubbing the blanket to make sure that we don't have anything happening at night when we are away. Our batteries were not fully burned out. That's why it was a problem.

Speaker 1: 45:38

And how did the people from the furry industry react to those reignitions? Were they worried with that? Because, as you said, you were scared that something will happen to your remote research facility over the night. If you're on a boat in the middle of a sea, that scare would be a little bit bigger, I guess.

Speaker 2: 45:57

Yeah, they are concerned. This is one of the concerns that everybody knows about, right, and they have already experienced some smaller fires like this reigniting, and it was very interesting to hear from them these stories. you know when we have some tool falling in the water and then somebody decides to charge it, and then it reignites. You extinguish, and it reignites, extinguish, it reignites, and they would be like, oh, we cannot extinguish it. So they have, on the smaller scale, experienced this and taking measures against that. But for the car they are concerned, of course, and that's why, as a result of, I think, both Lush Fire and our tests, they have developed some courses for the crew to learn on what can happen and how to deal with that.

Speaker 1: 46:48

Okay, so let's go to the final conclusions of your works, because we have so far described your experiences with them. Now let's go into the Polish conclusions. What have you given in your repos to those who were ordering the tests? Let's start with Magnus and Lush Fire. So what were the? You said the project finished, so I guess you have your conclusions worked out. So what were your final conclusions from the tests you've done?

Speaker 3: 47:16

I mean. The overall conclusion from the tests is that the fire in a battery electric vehicle does not seem more challenging for the drunken system design than the fire in a gasoline fuel vehicle. That's what's based on the overall conclusion.

Speaker 1: 47:34

So this means that the IMO standard, that is, or IMO protocol that is used today to design those drunken system, does not require urgent changes and ships that are using those drunken systems can, in a way, carry electric vehicles as if they were internal combustion vehicles, because the hazard would be the same and the performance would be similar.

Speaker 3: 47:56

Yes, that's exactly right, yeah, fantastic.

Speaker 1: 48:00

I mean this is an important finding also for the building industry, where we would have our car parks equipped with some sort of sprinkler technology or water mist technology. Of course you're talking about drunken system, so a large number of devices activated all together in a very specific space, in a very specific setting, so there would be multiple stars and small fonts to this disclaimer, but in general, overall it was not like a fire from the different planet, a fire from a different universe that would suddenly overwhelm the drunken system. It was just another fire of a passenger vehicle in a similar magnitude. Yeah right, Fantastic. And any other particular findings related on how to use the drunken systems.

Speaker 3: 48:43

The conclusion is, for example, that we saw a faster initial fire growth rate and high pitch heat release rate for the gasoline fuel vehicles simply because we sort of started the fire by involving the gasoline fuel. So lower fires in the battery electrical vehicles, if we make that comparison.

Speaker 1: 49:04

So on and on For the fire environment around, so you'd expect the drunken system to decrease the temperatures, heat fluxes. All of this was achieved in both types of vehicles, both tests.

Speaker 3: 49:16

Yes, exactly, we were able to. I mean, when talking about the performance of the drunken system, we looked at several different parameters. The primary was the surface temperatures of steel sheet screens, sort of to both sides of the car that was burning. So we tried to simulate, basically, cars closed by, so the side by side to the car that was burning.

Speaker 1: 49:42

So your vehicle was surrounded with some mockups like an iMotor test okay, exactly so.

Speaker 3: 49:48

we measured the surface temperatures of all these sheet screens and those temperatures were quickly reduced when the drunken system was started With some remark though for the gasoline bill fire, the temperatures were sort of doing the burn out of that flammable liquid fuel. The temperatures were quite high, but after that period of time temperatures keep down and were quite low actually. We also looked at the gas temperatures above the vehicles and those temperatures were really well below sort of critical temperatures. We looked at heat radiation also, and heat radiation so there was. The trends were similar to the surface temperature measurements. They come down as soon as the digestive system is operated.

Speaker 1: 50:41

Very good. I mean, both of you also had some findings related to hydrogen fluoride concentration, but I won't go there, we don't have time. But there's also some interesting findings in what you find in the water post-fire and what was the toxicity of the fire environment. Here I wanted to focus mostly on suppression, so I'll just drop mention that the stuff like that was also part of the investigations and people can perhaps look into the papers. So for you the main conclusions findings what did you tell the ferry people to do with those electric vehicle fires?

Speaker 2: 51:15

I would say that partially. Findings were done together with them is when they were present, tests and how they actually felt about using these different devices and how they saw what the success of these devices depends on. So, based on that, we can say that our partners if I name one, DFDS that I closely worked with my other colleagues looked closer at other ferries, so I have more of the information on DFDS. They have invested in fire blankets. They have water curtains also. Now they have actually made based on Lush Fire Project. They looked at the fire suits. They upgraded the fire suits underwear. They have a fog nail. That's not exactly the device that we tested and not intended to be used for electric vehicle firefighting, but still they are getting more confident, you see, and thinking okay, what's the situation? We could actually use it in case of any type of fire on board of a ferry. And I think that the main conclusion from our tests even though we didn't test the Drencher system that's why I really wanted to have Magnus with us because of this very well done test was that use the system, the water suppression system that you have, but make sure that it's activated early. That's what we saw both in when we done the literature review for the project of the past accidents that happened and when we tested the devices. If any of these used too late, then you wouldn't be able to control the fire. So we say use the Drencher system you have, but make sure it's activated early. So maybe you need to automatically activate it and review the procedures of what's happening.

Speaker 1: 53:05

The current procedure would be manual activation always. I'm not an expert in ships. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3: 53:12

They are manual activated. And this is for the property loss reasons, or Probably, and also because I mean then the management of the ship, the captain of the ship. He wants full control of the role that was happening. So he wants to give the order of starting the system once there's the fire. Typically also they, after firing an arm, someone, need to go down to the actual space and have a look and confirm that the release of fire and not only a false alarm and that they are the captain. And then the captain orders the start of the pump and opening up was correct. That huge section.

Speaker 1: 53:52

As long as this is an important finding for the maritime industry, for the building industry, where we would have automatically activated systems and like no one would risk hand activation of sprinkler device or water mist device in a car park, this is a good finding because in, let's say, civil engineering, we would have this activation very early. If the system is present, you would expect it to activate fairly early into the fire, which seems like good news. Yeah, guys, thank you very much. You walked me through two excellent research projects, very complimentary to each other. We talked about multiple types of prevention systems. Perhaps you have a final message, perhaps you can tell me what's. I always like to ask the question what surprised you the most during the fire test? I know there's always something going the other way, you've expected, in the fire test. I love to ask what was the oddest, most weird and surprising thing that happened during your experiments? Elena, I'm starting with you.

Speaker 2: 54:55

Well, that's the test number four. That's where we both overcharged and shorted the battery and when fire spread to the neighboring cars within three minutes, it was not only me who was surprised. It just ignited the battery and we could see the flames. Fire fires were not prepared and dressed. They would normally wait until they see something happening and start dressing. Because you don't want to stand there in full PPE and just very uncomfortable and difficult. Nobody was ready to see that fast flames coming from the battery and then spreading so fast and then spreading to almost all vehicles in no time.

Speaker 1: 55:39

Basically, Okay, so basically you're burning the same car for the fourth time. It always went in a certain fashion, so that's what you were prepared for. And then boom, suddenly it's a little different. I've been there, done that not with electrical vehicle fires but I know your feeling. That's a very interesting observation. You associate this difference with overcharge on the state of charge of the battery.

Speaker 2: 56:03

That's the only thing we've done differently and it's the same type of car. We had six cars of the same model test.

Speaker 1: 56:11

Okay, that's very interesting, but again, a disclaimer overcharging batteries is not something that would normally happen to a vehicle because there's battery management system that prevents you from doing that, of course. Of course it is. That's good news. With this statement, I'm a little worried. People like to perhaps get a little more performance of their vehicles than the factory gave them. That happens in the world of internal combustion engine, where you can map the engine to get more horsepower out of it. I wonder if there already is a hacking industry to hack the battery management systems to overcharge batteries or get more power out of vehicles. I hope not, but it seems like ridiculous to bad idea based on your surprising experience, magnus, the most surprising thing that happened in your test.

Speaker 3: 57:01

Well, I would say that I was a little surprised, and also happy, of course, about the good performance of the Drencher system. We saw, for example, that it prevents, even though there's a fire inside the vehicle, it in some cases the paint on the outside of the car was basically undamaged. Some of these cars had a glass tundra and that glass tundra was not burned through during the test because of the cooling of the water. And also I was surprised by the excellent cooling of the simulated adjacent cars. That was so good. I was very happily surprised by the excellent performance of the Drencher system.

Speaker 1: 57:48

But your fires, like telling from the megawatts you mentioned, like if you have eight megawatt fire, that is a really large fire, like I am scared above one and a half megawatt when you start your Drencher system. That's the size of a fire I'm usually comfortable and above I'm always scared, even though I've burned a lot of them. So you had big fires and the damage due to the Drencher operation was in an extent, under control. That's good news. That's good news that those systems work and then other confirmation that that's a technology that helps us battle those fires. A great finding and if that's a surprise you got, that's a very happy surprise. I'm happy to hear that. Okay, guys, we're well over time, but it was fun conversation, a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience from both of you. So thank you and see you here the next time. Thank you, thank you and thank you. What an interesting update on two big projects that happened recently in Europe on fire safety of different ships carrying electric vehicles. I had the privilege to see Lanna's presentation that I have assessed on the subject that she covered here today and I can tell you the room was absolutely full of people. There were no seats and there was no space at walls to stand even. That's how much interest this topic brought to the fire science community and I hope it also attracted a lot of fire engineers and listeners of the fire science show. There is much, much more, to both Project Albas and Project Lashfire. There are links to some reports in the show notes of the episode. If you want to learn more, you have to read about it. Lanna also done a very interesting webinar recently. I also put a link to that in the show notes. I guess we have not fully covered the whole topic of suppressing, extinguishing fires of electric vehicles and management of those fires, but at least I hope we brought a lot of knowledge to the table. We made people a little bit more comfortable with the devices, understanding how they operate, what you can achieve with them, what are the tools that are in use and just confirming that there are fantastic people working on making those tools useful, safe and, in general, solving the issue of electric vehicle fires in different settings, if the issue is even there. Anyway, thank you very much for joining me in this fire science show episode. It seems it's the last episode before Christmas, so Merry Christmas to you all. I'm going to have a small present for those who wanted. The Book of Fire is going to launch just before Christmas, so if you have not seen it yet, you are not in the beta test. There's an opportunity to join the Book of Fire by the end of this week and it's going to be great. It's looking very promising. I'm enjoying a lot creating it. It is way more work than I've expected, but I hope it is worth it. So the book of fire dot com starting out very soon Think Friday would be the day perhaps Saturday depends if I can finalize the last things in it as I wish. My timeline recently is very fluent and I'm not very happy with that. I'm very happy to work very hard to bring you the fire science and fire knowledge that you deserve. So thanks for being here with me. Thanks for checking out my other projects. There's one more project really huge project for the next year coming out very soon. You will learn about that from my LinkedIn and from my good friend Kruny. You must LinkedIn. We're trying to do something together. It's going to be extremely interesting for a large group of people, especially PhD students and postdocs, so keep your eyes open. Well, that's enough of teasing. Thanks for being here with me and see you here next Wednesday. Thank you Bye. This was the Fire Science Show. Thank you for listening and see you soon.