"Thermal Runaway" in 787 Dreamliner Batteries Must Be Stopped
From Forbes:
Boeing (BA) is certainly eager to get its 787 Dreamliner back into service. Unfortunately, all 50 of the 500,000 pound, $207 million aircraft that it?s shipped ? years late after at least seven missed delivery deadlines ? have been grounded.
And in a test of how much regulatory capture has taken place in the airline industry, there is a war going on now between the needs of Boeing and airline shareholders and those of people who fly on 787s.
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As MIT professor, Donald Sadoway, explained to me in a January interview, the photos of the batteries suggest that such thermal runaway is practically designed into the 787 batteries. That?s because the eight notebook-sized lithium-ion batteries are packed next to each other in a sealed metal box.
Those batteries are prone to heat up and the 787 battery design makes it difficult to vent that heat. Boeing told regulators that it had implemented a computer controlled system to stop such overheating. Moreover, if that system failed, Boeing?s system would channel the resulting smoke and flames outside of the aircraft without getting into the passenger cabin.
The whole article is here.
The guy who founded Tesla has some advice for Boeing:
"Elon Musk: Boeing 787 battery fundamentally unsafe"
The lithium ion batteries installed on the Boeing 787 are inherently unsafe, says Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and owner of electric car maker Tesla.
"Unfortunately, the pack architecture supplied to Boeing is inherently unsafe," writes Musk in an email to Flightglobal.
"Large cells without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect means it is simply a matter of time before there are more incidents of this nature," he adds.
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"Moreover, when thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire," says Musk.
The entire article is here.
