[danw1979]

This sounds great on paper but there’s a couple of questions left hanging:

> We take the battery, put it in an open fire, and watch it continue to heat up. What ends up happening is that the pressure above top charge will force the hydrogen back into water. And then we have a release valve designed into the unit so at a predesigned pressure and temperature that will release, and you’ll get a steam vent.”

But what about the hydrogen ? doesn’t that risk getting vented out with the steam ? into the barbecue ?

What’s the self discharge characteristics ?

[sheepshear]

A hydrogen fuel cell also vents and you can ignite the concentrated stream like a blow torch. At 5% the pressure of a H fuel cell, the battery probably vents less hydrogen.

[soco]

How are today's batteries doing when put in the barbecue fire? The new ones only need to not do (much) worse.

[thfuran]

How batteries do when placed in a barbecue is, for most applications, much less important than how often they spontaneously initiate a barbecue.

[liftm]

I laughed, but is that really true? You're going to have a lot of batteries/cells in one place, and one will inevitably start barbecue. Isn't the question whether the rest joins?

[thfuran]

I suppose it is probably hard to engineer a battery that is prone to spontaneous barbecues but resistant to the influence of outside barbecues. But I'm not sure I agree that it's just a numbers game that if you put enough of something in one spot, some of them are bound to suddenly catch fire without outside intervention.

[4death4]

> But what about the hydrogen?

Doesn’t it say the hydrogen is vented as H2O?

[danw1979]

Re-reading the article, it sounds like maybe the venting happens at some pressure high enough above the point at which H reacts back to H2O that there’s none left ?

[brutusborn]

I think the parent is assuming that there isn’t conversion. In the same way that electrolysers electrodes also have H20 in addition to O2 and H2.