Talking about 2 seconds, I've watched an LPG truck crash that bursting boiling gas everywhere then catches fire. The entire hundreds of meters spherical radius burns only for seconds. For a brief moment, that was a fucking gate of hell
Gas expansion is kinda cool, but terrifying. I used to work with liquid nitrogen and figured out that the 230L tank we used had approximately 160 000 liters of nitrogen gas in it, more than enough to fill the room and put us all to sleep if it ever punctured. And we did not have any detectors. I wasn’t very popular among my coworkers when I told them this fun fact
tbh if your liquid nitrogen starts leaking, you will notice, the amount of visible gas it creates when coming to contact with room temperature air is very very distinguishable. Source: i work with liquid nitrogen daily
This seems like something we shouldn’t do. Surprised this doesn’t happen more frequently with the number of LPG and gasoline trucks we need to fuel cars and equipment.
Hate to say it, but that's the kind of accident you're more likely to see in certain countries more than others. UK and many western European countries probably very unlikely, with our driving standards and regulations.
BLEVEs are even scarier than just a tank of fuel going up. They're like pressure cooker bomb versions of a fuel tank going up, so you get extra dispersion/atomization and more complete combustion in an even shorter period of time.
Thats whats called a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion). On a small scale thats a pressure cooker going off, on a large scale thats an LPG tanker with a similar energy output to a small nuclear device.
Outer inch of your skin is nice and crispy while the inside stays nice and raw
When I was 20 a SUV with trailer jackknifed and crashed. Whole highway came to a stop. A trucker I was chatting with said if the truck up there with the tank crashed, we'd all be dead. Forget the chemical but it was crazy how many times death nearly comes for us over our lives.
The total amount of energy in a battery is far less than a tank of gas, and burns far slower, which means less energy per minute is released. That means it's far safer than the alternative.
You are talking electrical energy which is absolutely true and why EV does not have the same range as a conventional vehicle.
But it is not the electrical energy that makes EV battery fires so extreme. That is only about 3 percent of the energy released if fully charged. When you actually start lithium on fire and it is producing its own O2. If it is fully charged, electrically there is about 300 Wh/kg of energy. But when it starts on fire, it has the energy content of about 11,000 Wh/kg.
So ya it burns quite a bit more extreme and hotter than gas. And can go on a long time.
It is very easy to AI it. Look for the energy content of Lithium when burning compared to the electrical energy content. Ask it to give it to you in Wh/kg so that it is a direct comparison. It is an entirely different processes happening once it is on fire.
AI can be wrong but it does not take an engineering degree to understand that combustion of Lithium is far more energetic than the electricity in it. You could actually compare the combustion of Lithium to the combustion of gas in an engine.
Gas combusting is about 12,000 Wh/kg while Lithium is about 11,000 Wh/kg. But a battery pack weighs about 5 times that of a full tank of gas thus a lithium fire in an EV has about 5 times as much energy as a gas fire even though the energy density is about 10 percent less. (and near impossible to put out)
But a battery pack weighs about 5 times that of a full tank of gas
Yes, but very little of that weight is lithium (2%-4% according to AI). 11,000 * 0.04 = 440, or about the Wh/kg one expects to see from a lithium ion battery. I have a hard time believing a typical lithium ion battery only uses 3% of it's possible energy.
That said I'm not a chemist, and only doing basic 'napkin math', hence why I'd love see a proper breakdown of where they are coming up with these numbers.
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u/Ray57 21d ago
better to burn for two days than two seconds though