This is an idea that entered my mind. As far as I understood lithium ion batteries still need oxygen from the air to burn.
They don’t provide their own oxidizer IIRC but they do reignite when left to dry because they rapidly build up heat again. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit: I was wrong: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X24008739
The cathode breaks down into oxygen among other things.
Would it make sense to have a lithium ion battery inside an airtight enclosure and fill it up with nitrogen? This way the only source of oxygen is from the decomposing cathode but that should react away quickly. The fire will be much less intense than in regular air. Assuming the enclosure holds.
Is this a silly idea? Is it even worth doing?
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“As lithium-ion battery fires create their own oxygen during thermal runaway, they are very difficult for fire and rescue services to deal with. Lithium-ion battery fire control is normally only achieved by using copious amounts of water to cool battery cells.”
Source: Fire Protection Association
As far as I understood lithium ion batteries still need oxygen from the air to burn.
This is incorrect.
The most common method for addressing a lithium-ion vehicle fire involves fully submerging the vehicle to allow the energy to dissipate as steam.
However, many underground parking facilities in my area are beginning to ban electric cars, as more fires start to occur, and retrofitting the necessary tanks to ensure fire safety is proving challenging.
Li-ion fire safety is a very difficult thing.
Most likely, it could help slow the process (buy time for firefighters to arrive) in some percentage of cases where a cell’s surface has been mechanically punctured.
Provided large amounts of nitrogen and an already empty battery (devoid of chemical energy), in a small percentage of cases, it might prevent a fire.
However, having seen a lithium polymer cell heat up from mechanical damage (a drone crash), I can confidently tell that very high temperatures can be achieved without oxygen. They’ll just be even higher with it.