LMP “solid state” EV battery cells ?

Hillhater

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A recent spate of electric bus fires in Paris, Europe, has brought to attention the battery tech used on those vehicles.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2022/04/29/paris-suspends-electric-bus-fleet-after-two-fires_5981956_7.html
The vehicles are made by “Blue Bus” by the Bollore company and use their own manufactured battery technology termed “LMP” or Lithium Metal Polymer cells,..a cell without Nickle or Cobalt, and claimed to be “Solid State” and safe !.
This seems to be a mature commercial technology in use for several years and outside the normal LiPo, LiCo, LFP, LiFePo4, NMC, NCA, etc etc technologies.
https://blue-storage.com/en/our-technology/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_lithium–metal_battery
Has this been off our radar for some reason (low specific energy, low charge/discharge rates etc), as i dont recall any discussion on this technology.
My concern is that they have been claiming the technology is very safe, and there is no risk of fire.....but videos of those bus fire/explosion plainly disprove that. ,!
[youtube]5r-yN8SugWM[/youtube]
 
There's always a risk of fire in an electrical system carrying high currents and/or storing high energies.

It may not come from the cells themselves; it could be just a wiring fault, or a crash, etc; shorting the system out, and heating the wiring until it catches fire and/or sets fire to things around it. Once the fire is started, eventually it may reach the battery pack, and at some point it will begin releasing energy from it, even if only by continuing to short across cells or internals creating massive amounts of heat (assuming no internal fusing).


This post mentions the cells
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=67008&p=1008380&hilit=LMP#p1008380
 
Thanks for the link AW..
Yes there are many ways for an EV fire to start, but Bollore specificly state these cells will not burn and are immune from thermal runaway.
I think that video suggests otherwise.
Incidentally, 2 more similar buses have also burned in Paris since the one in the video, and the whole fleet of 100+ vehicles have been withdrawn from service.
 
Hillhater said:
Yes there are many ways for an EV fire to start, but Bollore specificly state these cells will not burn and are immune from thermal runaway.

They might be immune to thermal runaway...but *everything* in a vehicle's electrical system will burn if you heat it up enough, like if there is a fire already going from another source. The batteries almost certainly have some form of plastics as insulators, and plastics do burn (even ones that are "hard" to burn, still will if you heat them enough). Similarly, they probably have metals in them in thin plates, etc., and those tend to burn fairly well, too, heated sufficiently, with airflow to get oxygen to them (or dissociate it from other adjacent materials).

And again...even if the batteries themselves don't burn (unlikely), they still provide current to anything that's shorted their + and - together, which in a fire could certainly happen as things melt, collapse, touch, etc. and that's going to create more heat and worsen the fire.
 
I didn't see any video in the article or posts; apparently the forum isn't showing me embedded YTs. I quoted the posts to see what was in them and found the YT video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r-yN8SugWM
and watched it, and that is a very definite battery fire...whether it started from a battery or a wiring fault, I can't tell, but the batteries would have to have been quickly involved in the fire itself to do what is seen there.
 
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