How to tell if a Lithium-ion are safe and more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on Maine's WGAN Saturday Show [10-26-19]

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We are going to discuss how you can tell if Lithium-ion batteries are about to catch fire.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

 

Craig Peterson
Hello, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, you're listening to me on WGAN. And of course online as well at Craig Peterson dot com. We're going to get into these electric vehicles right now. And I can remember when they first came out, and what Lou, you know, rumors and things. And I was very involved with emergency services back then. And what I thought was just fascinating. When we started delving into some of this stuff was that wait a minute, we've got a lot of batteries in the car, which means we have a whole lot of electric potential electricity sitting there, right. And then we have to route that power to the electric motors that are either one on every wheel or maybe there's a central motor with some form of a transmission that takes it out to all of the other wheels. That is a true hazard to first responders. Because we would get on the scene many times you'd have to cut people out of a vehicle, which is obviously a bit of a problem if you're cutting into the vehicle, and there is a power cord there. And then, of course, cars in an accident, sometimes they will kind of break apart and then you have exposed wires that could cause electric shocks and burns to the occupants of the vehicles. It was very concerning and so a lot of the electric vehicle manufacturers came out with guides that they would give to the emergency medical responders to police departments, fire departments, you know, the people who are likely to kind of be first ish on the scene. And we would have to know Okay, wait a minute. Now this manufacturer that model so we have to Worry about the power is right over here. And if I want to disconnect it for this particular car, we're gonna have to disconnect there. Because time was batteries were always under the hood of the car in a pretty specific place either the right or the left who could just pop the hood and then cut the wires one of the very first things you do on this scene, you just pop the hood cut the wires on the battery tena, guess what you're not going to get a shock because the battery is completely disconnected. And now in some cars, as you looked at some of the BMW where they were trying to do and even weight distribution, they would have the battery in the under the backseat or sometimes in the trunk. But we knew which cars were which because there just weren't that many of them out there that you had to worry about how you know, lots of different things started getting very confusing and then now you've got all these electric cars with different types of batteries and different ways to route the power. Well, now we have all kinds of These cars out there, including Tesla. And what Tesla is doing for their battery power is basically they're using laptop batteries. They're using lithium ion batteries, which are phenomenal batteries. And they don't get the memory that all of the previous generations used to get. In fact, did you see the guy that invented lithium ion batteries, he just got the Nobel Prize this year and the guy is pretty old. We talked about him last year too because he came up with the new technology. He called it lithium glass and it got rid of almost all of the problems that lithium-ion has. But we're still using lithium ion battery. So let's get into the problems. You probably know that I had a laptop because I've talked about it on my show before but my laptop, I would put it on the table. And have you noticed that all four corners sit nicely, right and if they don't, it's usually because of You've got a foot missing. So you find okay the feet fell off so you find another foot that fits and you put it on and hopefully the laptop balances on the table.

Well, I had all four feet on my laptop and I looked at it I said wait a minute now and I called over my son I said, Hey Steve, come over here. Have a look at this. And we put it on another flat surface and we got down low and we looked and sure enough, there was a bulge pretty much in the middle of the bottom of my laptop. Well, that was a very big sign to me that it's ball Jean because the battery is swollen. That is one of the problems of the lithium-ion batteries. Now this has been true with nickel-metal hydride and I kept before it but when that battery swells in the lithium-ion battery, it gets very, very, very dangerous. This is where you start seeing fires. Where the lithium ion batteries Because they're swelling up, and they have layers inside, that when some of these layers come in contact with each other, you now have a short inside the battery. Now think how long your device last, my laptop can last seven hours on a chart, depending on what I'm doing right if I'm doing video editing, I'm down to about an hour. But if I'm doing some writing a little bit of research online and stuff at six or seven hours pretty consistently, that is a lot of power, even only for the one hour words running eight cores, and a GPU trying to do the video editing and if you're watching online, you can see some of my video stuff on this computer behind me This is an iMac five k that I use for some of my video editing and recording of the show so you can see this if you're watching me on YouTube or on Facebook. But this becomes a bit of an issue for people. Frankly, because all of that power that's going to charge, or excuse me, run my computer for the next six or seven hours is now shorted out. Now have you ever been working on a car and you're under the hood, and you've got a wrench in your hand or a spanner for those of you from the UK in your hand, and you get near the battery, maybe you're trying to disconnect the battery and you accidentally short circuit between the positive terminal on the battery and the ground. Almost all cars worldwide use a negative ground nowadays. didn't use to be that way. So you accidentally shorted out to ground. Have you seen what happens? It goes zap there are sparks flying everywhere. And there's now a chunk missing out of your wrench. Right? Maybe Maybe not a huge trunk depends on the battery. But you have melted that part of the wrench. That is a lot of power that's in there. Well, it's a different amount of power in one of these lithium-ion batteries that we have, but it is still a lot of power. And so when it shorts out, it starts fires. Now we've seen that with Samsung phones have been famous for that, certain models of their phones. And that wasn't really the model of the phone that was as much of a problem as a manufacturer, the battery sometimes it is the model of the phone because it's putting pressure on the battery and sponsors shouldn't put the pressure on. Again, if you're watching on video, you can see me doing this what happens if you put pressure on the wrong spot as part of the battery. It'll show that again. Okay, so there are real potential problems here. So I knew that my laptop because that battery was swollen That I could have serious problems, I could have a fire on my laptop. Now I took it back to the manufacturer, which was Apple because of course, that's who I use mostly and then actually wasn't even made by Apple was made by contract, right. And they come they replaced it entirely and they fix the swelling and everything. And then they eventually ended up recalling all of those laptops. And it was a 15 inch MacBook Pro from one was I think it was a 2017 model.

And that, that I think was a good thing because they thought Well, they've seen a few of these. And you've seen pictures of these phones beyond people's nightstand. So you have your phone and your phone is, of course, a device running off a battery and most likely a lithium-ion battery. So that lithium-ion battery is there in the phone. If it starts to fail, usually the phone will swell. So if you have any devices that are starting to swell, any battery power devices starting to swell, it's time to get very concerned and take it back to the place you bought it from or take it back to the manufacturer. Because when it swells, it can easily start a very smoky, nasty fire. And we've all probably seen videos of this happening in airplanes. So when we get back we're going to talk about this poor man who died this 48-year-old and the news that came out of California, just this week about his Tesla, and the batteries. You're listening to course to Craig Peterson, right here on WGAN. And also online, Craig peterson.com. Stick around, because we'll be right back

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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