Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries look similar to conventional ones AA batteries, however, they have a huge advantage over them in current strength and capacity. They have found application in modern household appliances: from smartphones to video cameras.

It should be remembered that, like any other battery, a lithium-ion battery carries some risks. Despite the fact that such a battery is relatively small in size, the consequences of its explosion can be very sad. Improper use and disposal may cause burns, poisoning and contamination. environment.

But perhaps the worst thing is that. This means that everyone must be aware of what to do if the cause of the fire is a lithium-ion battery.

First of all, it should be noted that fire of this type of battery is extremely rare. The battery is more likely to swell and leak electrolyte, but nevertheless, every year the news describes cases of exploding batteries in smartphones and other devices.

What are the causes of a Li-ion battery explosion?

Most often, batteries whose service life has expired explode. After 4-5 years, the body and inside of the battery undergo changes due to the action of the electrolyte, and therefore the battery becomes extremely vulnerable to temperature changes, vibration, short circuits and mechanical damage. The short circuit causes the chemicals inside the battery to react and form gases. The battery begins to heat up and swells.

Of course, the battery has protection: it is a special valve that opens under a certain pressure and allows gases to escape. But sometimes the reaction speed inside is so high that a real explosion of the battery occurs, during which you see streams of sparks. This is how gases ignite when they come into contact with oxygen from the atmosphere.

How to put out such a fire?

If the device was connected to the network, first of all you need to unplug the cord from the outlet. This will not stop the battery from burning, but this way you will protect yourself and your apartment from major damage. Be careful to remove the battery from the device and place it in a fire-resistant area, such as a bathtub or kitchen sink. If possible, just let it burn out and cool, and then dispose of it.

A powder fire extinguisher is the most effective means of combating a burning lithium-ion battery. But in a critical situation, any standard fire-fighting measures will do: extinguishing with water, sand, thick fabric.

It should be remembered that we are talking about batteries small size. Extinguishing with water large Li-ion batteries, which are equipped with electric vehicles, is extremely dangerous due to the violent reaction of lithium with water.

Spontaneous combustion of a lithium Li-ion battery

In our lives, lithium batteries have already firmly taken their place and in many cases play key role. Of course, every battery has a limited lifespan, but can it last longer and be more efficient? Hopefully a small collection useful tips, provided below, you will definitely find it useful.

How do lithium batteries explode?

Standard conditions for using batteries: ambient temperature up to 60 degrees Celsius, without any additional thermal and/or mechanical influences. These ideal conditions will provide maximum term battery life and protect you from unpleasant surprises.

At the same time, the battery should not be placed in a compressed space, near sources of fire or high temperature, during use, the battery should not be subjected to physical deformation, punctured, or even drilled. Because even one of these moments can cause the battery to explode.

And more! Do not disassemble batteries under any circumstances!

Appearance of batteries

After prolonged use, the lithium battery begins to produce gas and the battery itself begins to swell. In more rare cases, the battery begins to leak. And if suddenly you notice such changes in the battery, you should immediately stop using the device and disconnect the battery itself from the source of consumption. Of course, you must be careful not to short-circuit the contacts of the battery itself.

All batteries are designed on average to a certain amount discharges and charges. Over time of use, internal structure The battery is destroyed, the shape of the battery changes and the capacity begins to decrease. I am not writing this so that you start using appliances less. lithium batteries, I am writing this so that you can evaluate the “age” and remaining life of the battery. Below is a photo of a player in which the battery crushed the screen and deformed the case.

In addition, we ourselves must develop good habits and use only original chargers. Each battery, depending on the capacity, type and material used, has defined parameters charge, so even the same mobile device manufacturer can produce different chargers. Please don't forget this.

How to care for lithium batteries?

As mentioned above, with use, the battery life decreases. So, if during the operation of the battery, you notice that with the same battery charging time, the operating time of the device is significantly reduced, then most likely the battery life is coming to an end and it’s time for you to think about replacing it.

Previously, attention was often paid to training batteries through several cycles full discharge and charge. It's time to forget this. Lithium batteries do not have a memory effect, so these “procedures” are simply useless for them.

Optimal conditions for storing the battery: charge level is about 40%, in a cool (0-10 degrees) place. At the same time, you don’t have to worry about batteries for about half a year. Once every six months you can check the charge level to maintain it around the 40% mark.

I would also like to note the fact that lithium batteries are subject to natural aging, even if they are not used. Over about 2 years, the battery loses about a third of its capacity. This suggests that there is no need to stock up on such batteries for use and that when purchasing them, it is necessary to look at the date of manufacture.

Nuclear battery or batteries of the future.

Technology does not stand still, but several times a week we still have to take out a charger at home and connect our mobile phone and player to charge overnight. This has become a habit for us and we no longer pay attention to the routine of these actions...

At the same time, there are already nuclear power sources whose dimensions are comparable to the size of a coin.　 Such sources are capable of generating energy for about a hundred years without any intervention or any recharging, which makes us think about the prospects of this direction, doesn’t it?! In addition, do not be afraid of the name; these elements are absolutely harmless to the life and health of living beings.

So soon, it seems, we will completely forget what a charger is, what they are and how to use them

Reasons for a phone battery exploding and how to avoid it

The battery in any device is a bank electrical energy, in which certain controlled processes take place. If you misuse the battery, damage it intentionally or accidentally, the consequences can be very unpleasant. It is worth noting that most batteries use substances that are harmful to human health. When they are disassembled, destroyed, or exploded, harmful elements, liquids and gases escape. Regarding batteries modern phones, then they are overwhelmingly lithium. Lithium is an extremely unstable material and can easily ignite in air. Under certain circumstances, your phone battery may even explode. Today we will look at the reasons for this phenomenon, and how to avoid it.

One of the reasons for a battery explosion is a manufacturing defect. Only the scrupulous choice of the seller can save you from this. Manufacturing defects usually make themselves felt immediately after the start of operation. Often the defect manifests itself in bloating battery. The operation of such a battery should be stopped before it explodes. We advise you to read about.

Large manufacturers have a strict quality control system in their factories to weed out defective batteries. Reputable battery sellers monitor the products on their shelves. Therefore, you should purchase a battery for your phone only in trusted places. When doing this, always inspect the battery. If you order a battery from an online store, be sure to read the reviews about it.

When inspecting the battery, pay attention to dents, chips, swelling, marks from falls and impacts. Also make sure there are no other shape changes. But problems can lie inside without visible external flaws. The phone falling, without visible consequences, may appear later.

Of course, a battery explosion is not a rare occurrence. But the consequences of shocks and falls can manifest themselves in a decrease in service life, a decrease in capacity, etc.

So, when buying a phone battery, pay attention to the following defects:

• Chips;
• Dents;
• Bloating;
• Other shape changes.

It’s not a fact that such flaws will cause the battery to explode, but why unnecessary problems?

If your phone battery has exploded, you need to try to put it out as soon as possible without panic. Then examine yourself and those around you for injuries. If you received serious damage, immediately call an ambulance for assistance medical care. At this moment, you should think about your health and those around you, and not about your phone. As a result of a battery explosion, a person can be seriously injured. serious injuries.

If the battery in your phone exploded without consequences for your health and those around you, then this is real luck. Then, immediately after extinguishing, you can proceed to inspecting the device. The likelihood that the phone itself was not damaged when the battery exploded is very small. However, if the cotton was small, then it is possible that the case and the board will not have time to melt. If so, then consider yourself doubly lucky. If a battery explosion occurs in a new phone when it is correct operation, then you can safely carry it to service center, since this is a warranty case.

During operation, the following reasons can lead to an explosion of the phone battery:

• charging the battery in a room with high temperature;
• battery use when high temperature OS;
• charging and storing the battery in direct sunlight;
• attempts to open the phone battery in various ways;
• improper operation, intentional or accidental (ignition, heating in the microwave, etc.);
• in some cases an explosion may cause incorrect charging battery without phone.

Real cases of phone battery explosions among users

It won't intimidate you too much since your phone battery exploding is not a very common occurrence. This mainly happens when the user deliberately tries to cause an explosion, in case of improper disassembly or poor quality battery. But such cases occur periodically and are not something out of science fiction.

Cases of phone battery explosions have been occurring regularly since the second half of the 2000s. Just from the moment when they became widespread in mobile gadgets. Since then, reports of exploding batteries in phones, tablets and laptops have regularly appeared in various media. Here are some of them.

In China in 2007, it was reported that a worker at one of the metallurgical enterprises had an explosion in his battery. mobile phone right in your clothes pocket.

A couple of years ago, a similar incident occurred in Kazakhstan. There, a girl's smartphone battery exploded in her pocket. Samsung Galaxy S2. After the battery ignited and exploded, the girl's jeans caught fire. As a result, the child received a serious burn to his leg.

In Finland, a local resident was not injured when a Nokia battery exploded. She dropped the battery, as a result of which it discharged and did not gain capacity upon subsequent charging. After disconnecting from charger The battery suddenly heated up, swelled and exploded.

In the same Finland several years ago, the owner Samsung phone The battery exploded when the device fell to the floor. Moreover, the explosion was so strong that the floor at the crash site was severely burned.

Quite a lot of cases of Nokia and Samsung battery explosions have been recorded in Vietnam, India and other countries in the Asian region. In addition, there are even more cases of explosions of counterfeit Chinese batteries. But it's not just Chinese and Korean phone batteries that explode. There are quite a lot of examples when they exploded iPhone batteries, iPad and other top-class products.

For example, in France for recent years several dozen cases of explosions were recorded iPhone batteries. Several devices exploded in the hands of their owners. Some were seriously injured. Flying fragments hit them in the face. An explosion was recorded in the UK not long ago Apple battery iPod Touch.

Of course, compared to the number of normally used batteries, the number of explosions is “a drop in the bucket.” Therefore, there is no need to panic. But you need to understand why this happens. It all comes down to the materials used in lithium batteries and the processes that occur within them.

Batteries for phones are being produced in an ever-increasing range of different sizes and shapes. Manufacturers try to reduce the size of batteries as much as possible with high capacity, since this allows mobile devices more subtle and graceful.

But this is where problems come from. Due to the fact that the main components of the battery (electrodes) are located as close to each other as possible, at the slightest violation of the shape, electrochemical processes are disrupted. This may result in fire and explosion.

As a rule, fire and explosion of the phone battery occurs due to short circuit(KZ). The battery design includes a separator that separates the positive and negative electrodes. If it is damaged (as a result of impact, manufacturing defects, puncture, heating, etc.), then a short circuit occurs and strong heating follows. Lithium batteries are very energy-dense, and lithium is an extremely reactive metal. So, as a result of a separator breakthrough, instantaneous heating, combustion and energy release occurs as a result of an explosion.

At the same time, this extreme activity of lithium is very useful in creating high-capacity batteries (lithium-ion and lithium-polymer). Alkali metals of the first group of the periodic table (sodium, potassium), which includes lithium, have high reactivity. These metals can easily ignite in air. In addition, the interaction of some of these metals with water can cause an explosion. All these factors explain why telephone batteries explode.

Attention! Above were photographs and videos of battery explosions. Don't try to reproduce what was shown there. Even if you are experimenting with an old battery, consider that ignition and explosion will cause damage to surrounding objects. And most importantly, you can cause irreparable harm to your health.

Friends, I think all of us have already heard about the danger lithium batteries(all of the following applies in full to lithium ion, Li-ion). In the Internet news, many read (or saw through an archaic television device, which many are still using by their parents) that entire planes are falling from their sudden explosions-spontaneous combustion, because for example, since May 16, 2012 USPS(US Postal Service) refused to accept for transportation lithium batteries(by the way, this is why it will no longer be possible to order from eBay all sorts of iPad, iPhone and other similar equipment from America).

In other cases, the owners of some phones were randomly killed by their involuntary explosion in very everyday conditions, and, as they say, out of the blue. In this regard, the old church concept " providence of the Lord“continues to work properly at the turn of the century, no matter how much some current adherents of the scientific and technical cult would like it.

If you read the charging instructions at all, it says: you can’t leave the device charging without further supervision (for example, charge at night while everyone is sleeping), you can’t put, say, a DEC phone on the base and leave home on business, you can’t In the same case, leave the laptop charging...

Speaking of the last one. I offer you my first-hand photo report of what sometimes happens with such batteries. This happened about a year ago in our office with my colleague’s laptop. It is not true that they say that this fate is only for left-wing batteries with muddy Asian roots - today we'll talk about a relatively new brand laptop DELL Inspiron , purchased from an American company store. Until now, no strange things have been noticed in it, until now it was working properly on the original factory battery (attention, there are a lot of photos under the cut, traffic).

Hell's Hell Dell

Before the demonstration, I once again emphasize that there was no preliminary spilling of anything on the laptop, there was no maliciously cynical picking of the despicable office clerk with a paper clip in its insides, and so on - it was an ordinary sunny working day and a peacefully working laptop with a running Excel, and suddenly... something in the laptop begins to crackle brutally and at the same time a column of smoke begins to pour out of it, and in response to the furious screams of its owner, who fearfully pressed himself against the opposite wall from the desktop, the entire office comes running... and these are the consequences of what happened to the laptop in the end.

IN in this case no one was injured, the laptop was quickly replaced under warranty, as is usually written in such cases - everyone escaped with “only a slight fright.”

More cases from the office front line

But below are photos taken from the news in relation to phones - their owners in most cases were not lucky enough to escape with a slight fright - there are deaths, disabilities, severed arms and legs and other not entirely pleasant consequences of irrepressible scientific and technological progress.

Here in particular I will give one more real example. Mobile phone battery spontaneously exploded Nokia N71, the battery flew about four meters with a deafening whistle and burned a decent hole in the carpet. Fortunately, there was a bottle of mineral water on the table, which we managed to immediately pour on the open flame, so no one was hurt. The cat was in a panic, and so were we.

Again, I would like to draw your attention separately: this was the original Nokia battery, not Chinese (in the photo below it is on the Samsung product instructions - do not pay attention to this, just at the time of the incident Nokia phone lay exactly like that). Therefore, the universal excuse from manufacturers - if you want to live, buy only original products (batteries), does not always really guarantee anything.

Below are the promised photos about the incident:

In conclusion, a cool video with tests of laptops (or rather, their batteries) - this is roughly how everything happens in life. At the beginning of the video there is a video scene from real life office - very similar to the above, but only in dynamics.

But at the end of the video (I advise you to skip the middle and blah blah blah) there is a laboratory demonstration of all stages of self-destruction of a laptop battery, which is also very, very useful to watch, “to avoid.”

If such a deadly process has been launched and it suddenly seems to you that everything has blown by - everything has finally burned out and you can see what happened there - do not approach the infernal device, because the burning of such batteries in most cases is of a cascade-cyclic nature, then There are phases of silence and serenity that can easily be followed by another explosion and flying pieces of hot metal and plastic.

So what should we do now?

In conclusion: be careful with charging, always turn off electrical appliances when you leave your home and your employer’s office (unless you are leaving him for good), and especially for programmers, don’t sleep like cats on the warm lid of your laptop when you want to lie down for a while - relax in the morning, after the “crazy programming night” is behind you - your head will rest peacefully on a battery with an average power of 5000mAh, from which your deep and healthy sleep may one day be tragically interrupted.

LP Guard - a special protective package for a rechargeable smartphone and other small devices

At the same time, a programmer, working on a laptop, should never forget that he is a warrior, so he should always have all his work completed, the code clean and refactored, the sources synchronized with his Github repository, in order to be ready to calmly depart to another world at any time. an unexpected moment for him.

And let’s be brave enough to say the main thing: carrying a mobile phone in the pockets of your pants is not just a blind tribute to our time, it’s our challenge to circumstances, it’s our everyday feat and a way to loudly declare our unbending masculine self and muscularity.

CLARIFICATION: Batteries are prohibited from being carried only in luggage, you just need to take the equipment into the cabin
— The Fastest Elephant (@FastSlon)

September 27, 2016 at 09:38 pm

How they explode lithium ion batteries

• Energy and batteries,
• Chemistry

Lately, the topic of spontaneous combustion of lithium-ion batteries has often been in the news headlines: a smartphone, a hoverboard, or even a car will catch fire. So what happens inside a battery during thermal runaway and why does spontaneous combustion occur?

The most common cause of spontaneous combustion of batteries is a short circuit inside the electrochemical cell. Electrical contact between the anode and cathode can occur for many reasons. This could be, for example, mechanical damage to the cell. An internal short circuit also occurs due to a violation of the production technology when the electrodes are cut unevenly or metal particles get between the anode and the cathode, which leads to damage to the porous separator. Also, the cause of an internal short circuit may be the “germination” of lithium metal chains (dendrites) through the separator. This effect occurs if lithium ions do not have time to integrate into the anode crystal when too fast charging or low temperature, as well as if the capacity of the active material of the cathode exceeds the capacity of the anode, as a result of which microscopic deposits appear on the surface of the anode, which gradually grow.

So, after a short circuit occurs, the battery begins to heat up. When the temperature reaches 70-90 °C, the ion-conducting protective layer on the anode begins to decompose. And then the lithium built into the anode reacts with the electrolyte, releasing volatile hydrocarbons: ethane, methane, ethylene, etc. But, despite the presence of such an explosive mixture, no fire occurs, since there is no oxygen in the system yet.

Since reactions with the electrolyte are exothermic, the temperature and pressure inside the battery continue to increase. When the temperature reaches 180-200 °C, the cathode material, usually a transition metal oxide with lithium built into the crystal, undergoes a disproportionation reaction and releases oxygen. This is where spontaneous combustion and an even sharper jump in temperature occur. In parallel, thermal decomposition of the electrolyte occurs (200-300 °C), which also releases heat. It looks like this:

And, in the end, graphite reacts with the electrolyte (if it still remains), and when the temperature reaches 660 °C, the aluminum current collector melts. The temperature usually does not rise above 900°C, since there is nothing left to decompose.

In addition to an internal short circuit, there are other causes of spontaneous combustion: battery overheating, improper charging/discharging (exceeding the maximum permissible voltage, charging on high currents, too deep discharge), etc. But all these reasons lead to one result: thermal acceleration and decomposition of the electrolyte when interacting with the electrodes. Only the orders of the above reactions and their speed differ.

Naturally, battery manufacturers have provided protection systems against spontaneous combustion, and the more and more powerful battery, the more degrees of protection it contains. One type of protection against a small short circuit is a porous separator, which, with a local increase in temperature, becomes impenetrable and prevents, for example, further growth of dendrites inside the battery. But sometimes the temperature rises too quickly and the separator simply melts, causing the anode to come into contact with the cathode.

The batteries are also equipped with fuses and valves, which, when the pressure and temperature inside increase, either disconnect the electrodes from the circuit or allow the accumulated gas to escape outside. In the latter case, since the gases are flammable, a flame appears on contact with oxygen from the outside. An example of the action of safety valves could be observed in an accident involving a Tesla Model S, where the battery was punctured by a large metal object. Since Tesla had the battery valves pointing down onto the asphalt and the individual blocks were well insulated from each other, only the front part of the battery burned out (as Elon Musk said, if the same metal object had pierced a gas tank, the entire car would have burned out).

By the way, the thermal insulation of individual blocks in a large battery is very important. If in the above example the Tesla battery did not ignite completely due to good thermal insulation, then in the case of the battery on board the Boeing 787, spontaneous combustion occurred due to the fact that the blocks were not insufficiently insulated from each other, which led to overheating of the entire system.

Also, lithium-ion batteries are equipped with controllers, sensors, charge balancers, etc. You can read more about battery safety systems.

As you can see from this post, the most dangerous component of a battery is the electrolyte, which decomposes into flammable components when the temperature rises. Today, scientists are trying to find more stable alternatives: ionic liquids, polymer electrolytes, solid-state ceramic electrolytes, etc. But this is a separate topic...