Massive Li battery fire in Korea factory kills 22.

[brucehoult]

They try, yeah thats hilarious! 10 or 100 lipos, is the limit on a whim?
Well, dont tie your life to smart phones, tablets etc or make special bissniss traveler rides to they can die on their own.
What about a fire proof box on every flight where travelers are required to place the battery before flight? Is that to much of a safety requirement?

There is a limit, yes.  100Wh per battery.  Up to two spares per device carried.  And then there's the overall 10kg weight allowance.

Presumably this limit has been set by experiment, a 100Wh battery fire can be extinguished on board the aircraft or propagation of the fire is not so rapid as to prevent the aircraft from landing.

100Wh would be 20,000 mAh at 5V, which is a figure I've seen elsewhere.

A gf carries around a 30,000 mAh power bank e.g. on flights Chisinau - Istanbul - Singapore - Nadi in late March, and the reverse in late May and has not been questioned doing that. (I didn't know about the power bank, or research the limit, until she arrived in Nadi with it)

[tom66]

Whenever I have flown with my larger power bank the security staff at the airport have checked the printed rating on the power bank.

I don't think they check laptops, etc.  but those limits are probably set by other consumer laws (i.e. you can't sell a laptop with >100Wh if you want people to be able to fly with it, which is pretty important for a laptop.)

And yes, the consequence of any battery fire is quite high but the likelihood is very low so I think it's fine. Note that you're not allowed to charge li-ion batteries during takeoff and landing stages on a flight, which is one way to reduce the risk as cabin crew would be seated during that time and it would be a lot harder to tackle any fire.

The biggest risk is things like vapes which use 18650s.  These batteries are not really safe for general consumer use, as the plastic wrapping that isolates the positive and negative can be easily damaged (the shell on most 18650s is connected to negative IIRC.)  So it only takes a bit of metal in the wrong place to cause a short and those can be extremely dangerous.  I don't know if they are restricted or not.

[coppercone2]

these are lithium primary cells of the lithium thinoyl chloride type.


Useful for cold temp low current, i.e. D cell "xenos". About as safe as a xenomorph

Their used for high rel big shelf life and hermetically sealed. More then likely this was a dodgy seal, combined with maybe a sliver of metal to short it out, or simply a internal short to blow the top open.

They are built robust, its designed to survive a autoclave or antarctica.


They contain a corrosive reagent, which is lithium thinoyl chloride. Its like sulfuric acid tantalum capacitors but for batteries.


I suspect that basically they use these for medical. People want cheap medical and its driven down to a cost because whos paying for that stuff anyway, its not like you can't pay in a civil society. Medical devices are often extremely cheap (one use), i.e. a single use surgical related device. I suspect this battery was built to a cost.

I remember a fair sized metal drum arriving, addressed to me, in the lab one morning, much to the mirth of the other engineers. It turned out to be a Lithium Thionyl Chloride cell sample that I had requested from Tadiran as a memory backup in a military radio prototype. The drum was full to the brim with Vermiculite with the little (approx 2/3 AA) cell wedged in the middle! This was back in the early '80s though.

things get interesting when its like "if we don't do this, we get people with broken bones dying from infection because the epoxy pump is not sterile". The doctor might not care about the dangers because he has alot in the hospital, unlike a high end R&D department.

its kinda scary but I think basically these batteries go right out to allow someone to do the impossible in a pakistan hospital or something.