Moto-E paddock on fire

Best thing to have is a big fire blanket, just cover it up and walk away for three days!

 

These are expected growing pains of new technology. I’m sure when mass adoption of ICE started there were all types of crazy accidents. As we gain experience we’ll learn safe handling techniques and these incidents will abate.

One thing that will probably change as a result of this incident is charging procedures. These things even though they’re solid state contain a huge amount of energy. They seem to be about as safe to store as gas in a big old plastic jug IE not at all. Bet the new paddock rules will mandate discharge during overnight storage and no overnight charging, if that’s practically possible. Alternatively, they’ll have to hire someone on fire watch overnight. How long does one of these bikes take to charge though?

 

I'm pretty sure one of the requirements was that they had to be able to be fully charged in 30 minutes...

 

well F1 had a battery fire, so it's not only two wheels dealing with issues, and they have had that technology even longer.

 

Revised schedule to be six races at four European rounds

https://motomatters.com/news/2019/03/26/revised_2019_motoe_calendar_announced.html

 

You can't just discharge a battery, the energy has to go somewhere, they use different batteries than the stock bikes, but they are probably somewhere around 14kwh, that means you'd have to use 14,000 watts for an hour to discharge the battery, or 28,000 watts in 30 minutes or any combination thereof it's not happening other than riding the bike. It'll take 3-5 hours to charge them traditionally when using the 3kw onboard charger.

That's only when charging high amp DC to DC, problem with that is it puts out a lot of heat and heat is the last the last thing you want when you're about to push the bike to the limits on the track. They'd have to either wait the 3+ hours between sessions, use multiple bikes, or DC charge then spend time cooling the battery back down and top off with AC charging.

 

While you very well may be correct, what would the point of having a 30 minute charging requirement if the bike becomes useless after charging that way? Just a matter of rule makers not really knowing what the feasibility of what their asking for is?

 

Harness the heat and warm the tires.

 

They would have to have some type of active cooling system. In order to charge 12kwh in 30 minutes that would take 24kw of energy, which isn't actually much in the grand scheme of things, Its all about displacing heat. The motor is oil cooled, the problem is cooling the battery, that runs a whole other host of problems and engineering. The tesla and GM batteries are liquid cooled, the nissan ones aren't and they get a lot of shit for it, similarly, this bike battery is air cooled.

Scroll down to page 11 and you'll see there's basically a hole in the battery case to allow air to pass down the middle, like vented rotors on a car. But unless there's air moving through the rotors, or battery in this case, there's no cooling going on.

http://www.fim-europe.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Energica-presentation-20180607-FIM.pdf

Yes you can stick some fans in there but that would only do so much, how well do the fans actually work on a dyno? As everyone knows even a watercooled vehicle will eventually become heat soaked in that situation. These bikes have been tested and raced all across Europe so I'm sure the manufacturer knows what they are doing, but even in a Tesla that has active, liquid cooling there are cooling problems during rapid DC charging and measurable degradation with continued use. The tesla actually siphons shore power and uses the air conditioner on the radiators to keep the battery cool during fast charing when the battery gets hot. I just don't see these engineers finding a way to overcome things like this with an air cooling system. More than likely they are charging at low levels and just spouting off the specs that things are capable of for advertisement. I don't see them charging in 30 minutes and jumping right out on track.

 

Damn that’s a lot of juice. No wonder these fuckers go up like Roman candles! With 3 hr charge times I guess you’ve gotta charge them overnight.

How physically swappable are the batteries?

 

Should be chargeable between sessions especially with a combo of DC fast charge and standard AC charging as long as they get the battery temp down. You want a warm battery but not a hot one, I also doubt they'd be doing from 0-100% every single session.

As far as swap-ability of the battery it depends on how they manufactured it, you can R&R a Tesla battery in about 5 minutes. In theory you undo the leads and unbolt the battery and that's it, it's just like any other DC battery you have in your bike/car.

 

Why firefighters dropped a smoldering BMW i8 into a water tank

https://www.autoblog.com/2019/03/26/firefighters-dropped-smoldering-bmw-i8-water-tank/

Sent from my smatrfone

 

Interesting. We run lithium batteries in our downhole tools and when they get wet they go BOOM in pretty amazing fashion.

 

electric vehicles get submerged in water all the time and don't explode. Rich Rebuilds on youtube has taken apart some tesla battery packs that were flood salvage and the cells are all corroded.

 

Those are lithium metal vs. I believe some sort of lithium polymer in the cars. Lithium metal batteries, especially the high discharge rate ones, go off like grenades if they get short circuited or overheat. I was working in the Austin Chalk quite a few years ago and it was so hot downhole that if the tool stopped working we just assumed that the batteries torched off. You could tell where each cell was due to the bulge in the pressure case... I think the lithium polymer ones just catch fire.

 

I’ve only had one battery event that didn’t vent through (blow up) the copper barrel, that was spooky. Normally they’ve done what they’re going to do by the time we get to them it’s just going through the PIA of dressing up like Walter White to follow procedure.