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Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

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Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#51

Post by donthellbanme »

bornfreddy wrote: post #24
jhugo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recorder contains alarms and other data as well as the conversations on the bridge. As I understand it, they're like an aviation CVR and FDR but combined. Just like with aircraft accidents, the conversations can provide as much (or sometimes more) value as the data. It gives you insight into decision making, details that may not be recorded in the data ("I was just in area XYZ and I saw sparks coming out of one o…

Curious - why is this recorder not a floating device (which broadcasts its position) so that it could be retrieved easily? It's not like it needs to record the ship's descent to the bottom. Or is the primary function of this device unrelated to sinking?

I believe all ships have a transponder.

Russian criminals were stealing rich boys million dollar yachts a few years ago.

They would board the ships when the skeleton crew was off the ship.

They would take the transponder, and put in model hobby ships.

The owner, and authorities thought their yacht was exactly where they left it.

The Russian thieves would take the yachts back to Russia.

(I thought is was clever. They stole millions of dollars in terms of yachts, and were eventually caught buy Interpol.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#52

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9

They say not securing the cars properly can cause impacts that cause fire. But these cars are impact tested for passenger safety. The only vulnerability for the battery pack will be a bottom impact which should not occur on Roll on-Roll Off Carrier. Ships do need to adapt their firefighting process for Lithium-Ion batteries. But I'm not convinced about impacts causing fire.

There's a couple videos on YouTube of vehicles on a carrier ship where the vehicles are bash around a fiar bit beyond what might happen in a passenger safety impact test.

This one shows the result of a ship passing nearby a Category 3 hurricane and teh aftermath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EqGzO_qsc

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#53

Post by elihu »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #9

They say not securing the cars properly can cause impacts that cause fire. But these cars are impact tested for passenger safety. The only vulnerability for the battery pack will be a bottom impact which should not occur on Roll on-Roll Off Carrier. Ships do need to adapt their firefighting process for Lithium-Ion batteries. But I'm not convinced about impacts causing fire.

I'm not sure what the inside of a car carrier looks like, but I think the idea isn't just that a little jiggle that causes the suspension to flex slightly is the concern but rather a car coming loose and falling on another car, or something similarly serious and unplanned that isn't supposed to happen if everyone is doing their job correctly. If it does happen you wouldn't want it to be a risk to the whole ship.

There's also the possibility that a battery just catches on fire all by itself because of a manufacturing defect. It can happen.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#54

Post by lnsru »

Since the normal container ships often have many refrigerated containers and the crew manage to control their temperature. Maybe roro ship crews will get access to the battery temperature data and will be able to prepare suspicious cars for offloading straight into ocean. Loosing few cars is probably better than whole shop with thousand cars.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#55

Post by Ekaros »

lnsru wrote: post #54

Since the normal container ships often have many refrigerated containers and the crew manage to control their temperature. Maybe roro ship crews will get access to the battery temperature data and will be able to prepare suspicious cars for offloading straight into ocean. Loosing few cars is probably better than whole shop with thousand cars.

That would affect capacity quite badly. My understanding is that these big roro ships really don't have room or height to maneuverer things around. Instead anything is backed as tightly as possible.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#56

Post by Ekaros »

elihu wrote: post #48
audunw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it hard to put out a fire when EV batteries are involved? If the fire doesn't start in the EV battery why would the battery catch fire? It might sound like an odd question, but we have experience with this in Norway, and the results are counterintuitive. Cars in a large airport parking garage caught fire, and it had many EVs in it. Not a single battery pack caught fire. Only the interior of the EVs did. If the…

One of the problems is that lithium ion batteries can't be discharged fully without destroying them. Effectively, the batteries are a very large energy source that can never be fully turned off. Another problem is that (if I understand correctly) lithium ion battery fires tend to produce their own oxygen. Another problem is that a manufacturing defect in one cell could cause the whole pack to catch on fire. According…

I'm not sure, but I am starting to think that battery fire is more like nuclear reactor or used fuel cooling than putting out of fire. That is you need to have enough water continuously applied to combat generated heat. Where as with fire just removing heat or oxygen one time is enough.

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#57

Post by elihu »

Ekaros wrote: post #56
elihu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems is that lithium ion batteries can't be discharged fully without destroying them. Effectively, the batteries are a very large energy source that can never be fully turned off. Another problem is that (if I understand correctly) lithium ion battery fires tend to produce their own oxygen. Another problem is that a manufacturing defect in one cell could cause the whole pack to catch on fire. According…

I'm not sure, but I am starting to think that battery fire is more like nuclear reactor or used fuel cooling than putting out of fire. That is you need to have enough water continuously applied to combat generated heat. Where as with fire just removing heat or oxygen one time is enough.

Yeah, I get the impression that's true. There's an electrochemical reaction that's going to take place whether you want it to or not, and you have to keep adding water until the reaction is finished.

I kind of wonder if it would help to pack batteries with something that requires a huge amount of energy to vaporize, so that the heat from a battery fire just goes into a state transition of some inert substance. (You could boil water off for instance, but maybe there's something more weight-efficient.)

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#58

Post by Animats »

I'm not too happy about very large lithium ion batteries as a mass market product in low-end vehicles. Lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't have the thermal runaway problem but stores less energy per kilogram, may be more appropriate there. Both BYD and Tesla are going that route at the low end.

Light electric vehicles (bikes, scooters, skateboards) are now causing a sizable number of fires in NYC.[1] It's mostly a battery quality problem, apparently. FDNY reported 28 battery fires in 2019, 44 in 2020, and 104 in 2021. Bike and scooter shop fires tend to result in multiple batteries cooking off.

One thing would stop much of this: making Amazon criminally responsible for selling power electrical devices which do not have verifiable UL certification.

[1] https://www.firerescue1.com/fdny/articles/fdny-massive-fire-...

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#59

Post by rjsw »

topspin wrote: post #43
montanalow wrote: post #3

This article is pure speculation by an insurance company that isn’t involved, and admit they have no idea what happened. FUD.

> speculation by an insurance company Speculation about risk is literally what insurance companies do; how they determine the terms of insurance. I learned a lot from this. One, shipping is pretty fly-by-night. Operators are winging it and trusting to luck in a lot of cases; failing to secure cargo for expediency for example. That's more corroboration than new knowledge. Two, fires are common on cargo ships: 14 times…

It isn't just speculation, it has already occurred [1], the fire has had an impact on availability of Porsche cars in Europe as more are being sent to the US to replace the ones lost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_Ace

Re: Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?

#60

Post by krisoft »

mlindner wrote: post #32
blenderdt wrote: post #22

This article is not about if EVs are safe. It's about the fact that putting out a fire when batteries are involved is hard. Every week there is a fire on a cargo ship. Most are not caused by the cargo. But when the cargo catches fire you want to be able to put it out before the whole ships turns into scrap.

EVs catch fire drastically less than combustion fueled vehicles because they don't involve explosive materials. Also we ship giant ships full of oil and gas all over the world every single day which is vastly more combustible than batteries.

> Also we ship giant ships full of oil and gas all over the world every single day which is vastly more combustible than batteries.

I see what you are saying, but the way we mitigate the fire and explosion hazards on oil and gas transport ships is not really applicable to roll-on/roll-off ships.

The oil tankers and LNG ships use a technic called innert atmosphere to protect their cargo from fire hazard. The idea is that they fill the ulage spaces with a gas low in oxygen to make sure an explosive mixture can’t form.

It would be very hard to innert the whole cargo space of a RO/RO ship the same way, might damage the cargo, would be hazardous to the operators and wouldn’t actually help with a potential thermal runaway of a battery anyway. I will discuss these points in detail:

How do they generate this innerting gas usually? There are two main options. You either use nitrogen, or you pipe in the exhaust gas of the engines. Nitrogen would probably be cost prohibitive. The RO/RO ships are cavernous. The exhaust gas based sytem would cost less, but would damage the cargo. Nobody would want a car which reeks like an ashtray.

The innerted atmosphere is obviously incompatible with human occupancy, yet the cars are usually driven on and off these carriers by a small army of operators. So you need to have processes to vent the innert atmosphere before the vehicles can be embarked/dissembarked, and you need other processes to ensure the venting worked properly otherwise your shore crew will suffocate. This adds complexity, and risks to the operation. This is not a problem on tankers because there nobody needs to enter the tanks during normal operations.

And then finaly why it might not help after all? The nature of electric vehicle battery thermal runaway is such that it doesn’t require oxygen from the atmosphere. It is an exotermic reaction, but not a “fire” in the fire-triangle sense.

So all in all, the one big trick of the tankers can’t be used with vehicle carrying operations. Thus the analogy is less than useful. Not saying that we can’t carry EVs safely, just that our ability to carry fuels safely does not in any way correlate with our ability to carry EVs safely.

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