09 Apr Electric Vehicles Fire Issues
Electric Vehicles Fire Issues – Today Current Affairs
(GS Paper-III,Science & Technology, Economic Development, Bio-diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management)
Source: Indian Express
Today Current Affairs
Why in News?
Recently several electric vehicles caught fire in India, one incident was reported from Maharashtra and three from Tamil Nadu. The Electric Vehicles(EVs) emitted smoke and eventually went up in flames, thus raising alarm over the safety of these Vehicles.
What are Electric Vehicles? The Hindu Analysis
These Vehicles are the ones which are partially or fully powered on electric power.
Some EVs use lead acid or nickel metal hydride batteries but now standard for modern battery electric vehicles is the lithium ion batteries.
About Lithium ion batteries : The Hindu Analysis
- The Lithium ion battery consists of an anode, cathode, separator, electrolyte, and two current collectors.
- The lithium is stored in the anode and cathode, the electrolyte carries positively charged lithium ions from the anode to the cathode and vice versa through the separator.
The free electrons in the anode are created through the movement of the lithium ions, which creates a charge at the positive current collector.
The Features Lithium ion batteries : The Hindu Analysis
- Greater driving range
- More efficiency
- Ability to recharge
- Light weight
- High energy density
- Ability to recharge
- A battery management system (BMS) due its high energy density is applied to a Li-ion battery to make sure they operate safely.
- The BMS constantly measures the voltage, current flowing, charging and discharging rate, battery life cycle, and efficiency.
The benefits and problems of Electric Vehicles : The Hindu Analysis
Benefits:
- They are environmentally friendly as they use minimum or no fossil fuels.
- They have low running costs as they have less moving parts for maintenance.
- Electric motors provide quiet, smooth operation and stronger acceleration and require less maintenance than internal combustion engines.
- They convert more than 77% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels.
- They are helping in reducing energy dependency.
Problems:
- The recharging time is high as fully recharging the battery can take 4 to 12 hours.
- Electric Vehicles have a shorter driving range as compared to conventional vehicles.
- The few battery malfunctions can cause a short circuit, it can kickstart a chain reaction resulting in a fire, provided a battery pack is tightly packed with a number of Li-ion cells.
Reasons for fire in Electric Vehicles : The Hindu Analysis
- Although the exact reason is not known, the short circuiting due to negligence in charging the vehicle can be one of the reasons.
- Other reasons for fire may be External damage, Manufacturing defects, faults in development, overcharging, extremely high temperature etc.
Future Course of actions : The Hindu Analysis
- Government need to come up with stringent rules and regulations
- The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has ordered a probe into the vehicles catching fire abruptly, similar efforts are required in a transparent manner.
- The government has allowed ETWs with speeds of less than 25 km/hour to be sold without any serious certification which is not a welcome move, there is need to have adequate security checks in place.
- The Centre for Fire Explosive and Environment Safety (CFEES) should carry out investigations appropriately.
- There are various debates regarding whether battery swapping would be a better solution for electric scooters in India.
- As of now when a user’s vehicle battery is discharged completely or about to be discharged, The third-party provider swaps it out with a fully-charged battery at a battery-swapping station.
- The advantage of swapping is that there is always an extra battery giving sufficient time to charge the batteries.
So, in this regard the government needs to take appropriate measures considering the interests of all the stakeholders and obviously the safety factor should be the top priority of the government.
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