A Novel Idea for Protection Against Battery Induced Fire Hazard in Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Of late a major drive is happening to shift to electric vehicles (EV) across the globe. Obvious reasons for this are the advantages such as no carbon pollution at the vehicle end, ease of control, economic running, etc. However, there are some issues also which need to be taken care of. One of them is the fire hazard induced by battery on board of the EV directly affecting the safety of the passengers and the vehicle itself. There are several incidents of such accidents reported. In an incident in China, which took placed in BYD e6 electric taxi, three occupants lost their life [6].Such incidents demotivate the potential customers and affect adversely the expected shift towards EV’s from the prevailing IC engine driven vehicles. The economic success of electric vehicle depends on the safety factor of the electric vehicle [7]. In this context, this paper proposes a novel method to provide protection against battery induced fire accident in EV’s. The proposed method detects occurrence of fire hazard and protection is provided by extinguishing the fire or for bigger fires, ejecting the battery itself physically out of the vehicle. The paper presents the design details. A prototype was also built and tested to demonstrate the proposed method, the test results of which are encouraging.