What did I write that you don’t understand?
I think we can agree that, at least for our purposes, venting with flame and explosion are pretty much interchangeable, but no…li-ion chemistries aren’t classified as explosive mixtures by the ATF (>~21,000fps.)
Explosions do happen in sealed tubes like flashlights and E-cigs. I watched the local news yesterday and some guy was shopping for TVs and his E-cig popped and you could see everything on the security camera. Most people would describe what I saw as an ‘explosive’ event and he was burned badly.
Li-ion cells do get hot and vent with flame. Lithium-cobalt has an oxidizer, so it can even pop in a vacuum, or vent with flame in water, if the core temperature is hot enough.
The problem with copper dendrites is that they form and create the short, but since the cell is depleted there is no heat build up due to a lack of energy, so no real issue there.
As I previously said, the problem occurs when the cell is unwittingly charged back up as if it’s in good shape and as the energy is transferred back into the cell, heat builds up to the point of thermal runaway.
Haven’t you watched the news over the last 5 years with the hover boards burning houses down?
Most are mechanical shorts via shoddy workmanship, but some are just crappy batteries of dubious origin that could have been sitting discharged in a warehouse somewhere, for years.
That’s all thermal runaway.
Chris
