Nov. 19, 2025

227 - The differences between EV and ICEV fires in car parks

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A viral clip of an EV igniting was what started my worries about safety in car parks I have been designing. Are we ready for fast growing fires? Since 2019 I've learned and studied a lot, I've relaxed on some aspects of it and was able to identify they areas where a lot more engineering considerations should be placed. In this episode I would like to take you inside the engineering choices that shape outcomes: ceiling height, smoke control, structural details, and how fast systems wake up when seconds matter. Instead of arguing EV versus ICE, we look at what the data shows across 148 vehicle fire tests and why there’s no single “true” car fire curve.

Think of a car as a set of compartments—the cabin, engine bay, trunk, wheels, and for EVs the battery pack—each with its own vents and barriers. That lens explains the wildly different heat release profiles you see in experiments and helps you separate worst-case lab setups from realistic design scenarios. We unpack why rapid battery-led growth is so challenging for low garages, how beams can trap and extend flames under the ceiling, and how wind can either help by stripping hot gases or hurt by pushing fire across bays.

From there, we focus on consequences and controls. For evacuation, the goal is to avoid early smoke cut-offs and protect crowded egress moments after events. For firefighting, the single most important factor is a clear entry path—no smoke between the crew and the fire—so water can be applied fast to stop spread, even if battery cooling remains lengthy. For structure, isolated car fires shouldn’t be catastrophic in robust frames, but long, multi-vehicle burns can threaten integrity without early control.

What works? Height buys time and reduces ceiling flame attachment. Smart smoke control drains energy from the layer and lowers radiation to neighboring cars. Thoughtful layouts keep chargers away from exits and closer to exhaust paths. And suppression systems may not “kill” a battery, but they cut plume temperatures, slash spread potential, and make the entire operation safer. We also surface key gaps: natural battery-initiated growth rates, context-specific risk acceptance, and handling potential explosive gas releases with low-level detection and dilution modes.

If you like to learn more, see more here:

Miechówka & Węgrzyński: Systematic Literature Review on Passenger Car Fire Experiments for Car Park Safety Design

Zahir & César Martín-Gómez: Evaluating Fire Severity in Electric Vehicles and Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles: A Statistical Approach to Heat Release Rates

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

00:00 - Welcome Back And Scope

04:41 - Takeaways From Hong Kong And Lisbon

09:15 - Career Context And Polish Practice

16:20 - Big Car Park Fires That Changed Perception

22:48 - Why EV Vs ICE Fires Look Similar

27:40 - Literature Review: 148 Vehicle Fire Tests

33:20 - Vehicles As Compartments, Not Cribs

39:10 - Fast Battery-Led Growth And Timelines

45:20 - Car Park Height As First Defense

52:00 - How And Why Fires Spread Between Cars

WEBVTT

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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After a few weeks of traveling around the world into various battery meetings and conferences, I am back home and I took the liberty to summarize some of the things that I have said on those conferences, that I have learned at those conferences and the discussions I had with people at those conferences.

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So this podcast episode is gonna be yet another electric vehicle in car parks podcast episode.

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I will try to give you a brief summary of where we are with the question of electric vehicle fires versus internal combustion engine fires in uh vehicle car parks.

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I've done this as a talk at the SFPE conference in Lisbon just a week ago.

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And uh in that talk, it was called Outcomes of EV5s and Car Parks Fire Engineering Design Perspective, very, very fire engineering oriented.

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In this talk, I've tried to summarize some of the key things that we have to consider when designing our car parks.

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Uh I said that I'm designing car parks for electric vehicles for almost 17 years of my career, and that's true because uh, whenever I've designed a car park in my career, eventually some electric vehicle did or will enter it.

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So it's not that we have a choice.

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In this talk, I'm gonna cover in what ways the electric vehicle fires are different from the combustion engine vehicle fires, and in what way they are kind of the same.

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Uh I would love to discuss the compartment fire dynamics in car parks, how much depends on the car and how much on the car park itself, and also how we can apply some of the fire safety engineering concepts to the vehicle fire itself.

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And then I would love to talk about how do we deal with this in engineering through the perspective of my own fire safety engineering that I apply in here in Poland.

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We will talk about the consequences of the fires in car parks in regards to evacuation, in regards to firefighting and structural fire safety, and also I'll try to cover some of the key tools we have to mitigate those consequences.

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I've kind of run out of time in Lisbon to talk about this in deep.

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I hope in this podcast episode I can cover this in a little bit more detail.

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So this episode summarizes a lot that has been said already in the podcast.

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There's multiple, multiple car park and electric vehicle and battery episodes in the podcast.

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If you would like to deeper dive on some of the aspects covered in here, I will send you to applicable podcast episodes.

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But yeah, I'll try to make this interesting and I and I'll try to pack as much value into those few minutes uh of the podcast as possible.

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So I hope you stay with me.

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Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the Firescience Show.

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My name is Voyage Vingchinsky, and I will be your host.

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And now back to the episode.

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Okay, so let's do vehicles in car parks.

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Electric vehicles in car parks, something that is very, very emotional for a lot of people.

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There are camps of people that have very strong opinions on some of the things.

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So I hope I don't offend anyone in this podcast episode.

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I truly just try to understand and do the best engineering I can when applying some of the knowledge and research that I see.

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And simply if I see something, it's it I cannot ignore it.

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But uh, that's later on in the show.

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Before we go deeper into the electric vehicles, I would just like to say a few words about the events that I've participated in.

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So I've been in Hong Kong at International Symposium on Lithium Battery Fire Safety.

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That was an excellent event at uh Hong Kong Pol Technic University, very scientific.

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Uh you've heard an episode with Noah on uh battery storage systems that was recorded at the Hong Kong Poly.

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A lot of talks, like very fundamental on the developments in batteries themselves, in developments of modules, prevention strategies at the level of the cell, the module, the whole battery, whole device.

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It was very interesting and yet kind of reassuring to see where the industry is headed and how people are approaching those fundamental problems, seeking solutions at levels which are normally not available to fire safety engineers, the fire safety engineers who work at building level.

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So yeah, that that was very, very, very interesting.

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I think if you want to learn about how batteries are built and how fire safety uh strategies are applied to the battery themselves, you have to go to China because that's where the development was.

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So, congratulations to Professor Huang and the Hong Kong Pol U group uh for organizing this uh spectacular conference.

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I really, really enjoyed it.

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Then I came back to Europe and shortly after, like a week later, there was SFPE symposium in Lisbon that was also covering uh batteries.

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There were multiple sessions about environmental aspects of battery fires, there was a session on uh buildings, car parks, there was a session on battery energy storage systems, so again, a lot of knowledge covered by multiple speakers, this time from a more applied perspective, this time a lot more fire safety or engineering oriented, and again, uh quite reassuring in the way where we're heading and uh what's happening around us.

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I had the privilege to discuss the electric vehicles in car park fire safety.

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There was also quite a nice talk by Paolo Ramos, who covered the strategies for managing car parks and providing fire safety in electric vehicle car parks as well.

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So maybe Paul can add something to my podcast episode at some point.

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Uh anyway, both events, very interesting, very intense, a lot of uh knowledge, and I'm very in a battery mood.

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People started asking me, did I become a battery person now?

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And I'm I'm not sure, I don't think I'm a battery person, but I'm just I'm I'm a building person.

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I've always been a building person, but people put awfully lots of batteries in my building, so yeah, it's not that I have a choice.

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Now, about car parks, I also like to storytell like how did I end up with this problem and uh where my thoughts and solutions are coming out.

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I think it's important for you to understand where I come from with this, so you can contextualize a lot of the thoughts that I say.

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I have been dealing with car parks since the beginning of my work at the ITB, so I've always been doing CFD for car parks, I've always been assisting people designing smoke control in car parks.

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In Poland, smoke control in car parks means full PBD pathway, computational fluid dynamic simulation.

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We prove that evacuation is safe in the ACE-RCED kind of approach.

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We showcase that firefighters are able to enter the car park.

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We use design fires, we simulate that, that's like a normal bread and butter of engineering.

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I just want to emphasize that this has been done in Poland since for me forever, because 2010 it already has been there when I started my work on car parks.

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And uh I said in the my bio that I designed car parks for electric vehicles for 17 years.

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Well, that's true because my car parks are for electric vehicles, are for hydrogen vehicles, liquid propane gas uh cars, whatever people try to put in them.

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I've been doing this uh for years.

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I've designed probably like a hundred individual car parks.

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That's a rough estimate of how many projects we've been involved with.

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In 2013, I've wrote a review paper in Polish about uh the state of knowledge on vehicle fires.

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In 2015, we've issued a book.

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It's called the ITB Instruction 493, uh, 2015, and it's about design of smoke control in car parks.

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It's kind of like uh I wouldn't call it the standard because uh there was no group of people writing it, it was just me and a colleague.

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But it it's it's kind of like a guideline on how to design smoke control in car parks.

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And it goes quite deep into the process, it goes quite deep into the things that you should consider.

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I'm still quite happy with that book even though it's uh ten years old.

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And we've been dealing with that and we've been going on with our lives, and some things started to happen.

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One thing is that we started to see very large fires around us.

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So 2017, the New Year's Eve, Liverpool in UK.

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I remember I was bound to give a talk at SFP Rotterdam in 2017, and when I was preparing, I was wondering how am I gonna justify that I deal with car park fires, it's kind of uninteresting.

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And then Liverpool fire happened, and then it was like, okay, well, this is important, this is I don't have to explain myself anymore.

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And since Liverpool, there were multiple large fires like that.

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Cork in Ireland in 2019, Stavinger in Norway, 2020, 300 vehicles burned, huge fire.

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We had a fire like this in Warsaw in 2020, 50 vehicles fire, quite big damage underneath the residential complex.

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That was the horrible part.

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People were kicked out of the residential complex for two years before the building was fixed and it was safe to come back.

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Really, really horrible.

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We also had a massive fire, perhaps the largest of them all at Luton in 2023, and many more of those.

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So today we see that sometimes the car park fires can be enormous and can be really, really huge, devastating losses.

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And if you look at the media attention and such a big fire happens, the first thing that you're gonna see considered is was this an electric vehicle fire?

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Did electric vehicles cause this?

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Did the electric vehicle cause the damage?

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And yeah.

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That's that's quite challenging.

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I'll I'll address this later in the podcast.

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The second thing that that made me research EVs was there was a viral video in April 2019 of a vehicle going on fire.

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I believe it's uh Shanghai, but I I have no way to verify that, it's just uh you know viral video from the internet.

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And that you can on that video you can see a vehicle, there's like it's standing, there's a small cloud around it, and then boom, there's fire going in all directions.

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And I I remember I was working on a car park when I saw that video.

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I was working on a commercial project, and then I see this, and I'm like, no, this is like nothing I have ever been designing for.

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Like this is an immediate fire growth.

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This is not a growth curve, it's immediate.

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So I've stopped my uh CD.

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I've restarted it by just putting uh I believe a megawatt straight on into answers, like 30-second growth linear, very quick growth, very quick fire, and just see what happens.

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And the car park, I was designing safety systems for the car park.

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I was happy with them.

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But for this design scenario, when the fire grew immediately to high power, the outcomes were much worse than in my engineering.

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And I was like, oh no, we're we're no red, not ready for that.

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And that triggered uh my interest in electric vehicle fires, that triggered my literature reviews, and that triggered all the work that I can talk about today.

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And yeah, well, the good thing is that I've calmed down and uh once we started getting knowledge, once we understand what the issues are, we can tackle this uh a little less with emotions, but more with knowledge.

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So now on to the knowledge part.

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So this is a podcast I'm gonna try to give it some structure so it makes sense to you.

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I'm first gonna talk about single vehicle fires, then we'll move into fire spread in the car parks, and then we will deal with the consequences of the fires.

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So let's start with uh single vehicle fires.

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I was looking into the problem of electric vehicle fires, and if we for a second agree that the normal fires, if if we consider fires of combustion engine vehicles, we assume that those are the baseline, those are the normal fires.

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I'm not saying they're fine or that they are not serious or not a problem, because I still believe we we have problems with those.

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But at least I think as a society we've learned to accept those.

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And I mean, every time a car burns in a car park or at the road and it's a combustion engine vehicle, you probably don't even hear about it.

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No one no one really cares, doesn't drive this attention like electric vehicle fire.

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So if we assume that those are baseline, those are kind of acceptable, the question is how much different the electric vehicle fire is.

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And at the presentation I've shown a specimen I photographed at a Nissan show house in Yokohama in Japan, they had a car cut down in in half and showing what's inside the car, and that was, I believe, a hybrid or maybe even yeah, I think it was a hybrid.

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And if you look at the cut of a car which has a battery, which has an electric engine, it has a combustion engine as well in it.

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When you look at it, it's really a very few details that are different from the perspective of the car at large.

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You you have the battery underneath your floor or or somewhere hidden in your car, the the motors are a little different.

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Of course you'll have like uh different uh coolers, different auxiliary equipment that's necessary to run your car.

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But besides this drivetrain thing, there's not that many differences.

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The interior will be the same.

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You'll still have a ton of plastics inside.

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You'll still have the same wheels, you'll still have similar brakes and all the things that connect to them, you'll still gonna have uh some sort of storage space, maybe even a little bit more storage space in an electric vehicle.

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I mean, at large, the differences are not that huge.

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And uh if you would look at it from the perspective of how much this impacts fire, I would say the fully uh fueled 60 liter gasoline tank, that's a lot of energy as well, if you if we compare it to battery.

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So I think uh just looking at the vehicle, the differences are not that obvious.

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And we were we were desperate to find what does the literature say about this.

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I've seen a lot of papers around uh coming out um recently.

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We wanted to summarize that, and uh I've sat on with my student Bartosz.

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Uh we were doing a project on open car parks, and I told Bartosz we need a good literature review because we need to justify the design fire.

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And uh two years later we written a paper on literature review on car park fires because that's how intense the work has been on that.

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What Bartosz done is that he went through the whole literature in a quite structured way.

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So we've approached scopious mining, then citation mining of papers, trying to uncover anything that has some results of vehicle fire experiments in that.

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In this way we have identified, I believe, 44 papers, which covered 148 individual vehicle fires in them.

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Uh the cutoff date was 1994 to start with and 24 when we've ended until till till the very last day we've been still adding the vehicle fires to the database.

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And from this database, we ended with a massive scatter of fire curves.

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There's an appendix to the paper, it's an open access, you can look it up.

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It's just a crazy scatter.

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You have very long flat curves that don't reach a megawatt, you have nine megawatt peaks very early into the fire.

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Like at the Lisbon I told people like, look at all those plots and tell me which is your design fire.

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Like which of them truly represents a vehicle fire?

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Because all of them are vehicle fires.

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All of them are fires of vehicles and represent some sort of events and fires that happen in a real vehicle.

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And which of them is true?

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There's no one true vehicle fire.

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We're we're unable to average or figure out one that will cover it all.

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That was one of the consequences of this literature review.

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We realized that it's futile to try and come up with a single thing that's gonna describe them all.

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Uh, we were looking, we were comparing in the paper you can find that you we were comparing different uh courses of fires with some interesting characteristics.

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We have one comparison where you have a short-lived very high peak fire compared to a long-lived low energy fire.

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Well, the long-lived one actually has twice the energy released than the short one.

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The question is which one is worse.

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If you consider a momentary peak, yes, the the one with the peak is gonna be worse.

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But if you consider the amount of uh pollutants released, for example, the other one is worse.

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So it's very difficult to say which fire is objectively the worse.

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And what makes it even more difficult is that is those fires are gonna be also an outcome of the environment in which they're burning, but I'll cover that a little bit later.

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So looking at the comparison between the combustion engine fires and electric vehicle fires, we figured out one thing that made comparison between them quite robust and possible.

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So a vehicle is not a fire crib, it's not a wood crib.

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It's not one uniform item that you put ignition at the right hand side, it spreads through all of it and it evenly burns until it burns out.

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It's for me I like to view the vehicle as a collection of compartments.

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You have the passenger compartment, you have the fuel tank or battery compartment, you have the engine front storage compartment, you have the rear storage compartment, you have the wheels, you have external elements, they are surrounded by some sort of barriers like real fire compartments.

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The passenger compartment has glazing which provides ventilation if broken.

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Like if you start looking at a vehicle from a perspective of a collection of compartments, and then you read a fire curve from an experiment, and you read the experiment description, it starts to make sense.

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You start to see that, for example, a fire started at the back of the vehicle, then it was little fire.

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It transitioned into the fuel tank, and you can see a peak in the heat release rate.

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But the peak is short-lived because the fuel spills and that starts to burn out.

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But eventually you read that the fire transitioned into the passenger compartment, you see another peak, and then you read that the rear window has broken or the front window has broken, which means a whole compartment ventilation was was changed, and you see another peak in the heat release rate curve.

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Seriously, when you start to investigate the experiments with this in mind, those curves make a lot of sense.

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And the reason why they are so different is because those things in those experiments happened at different and different places.

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So now if you if you think about the knowledge that we have right now, we have a collection of fire curves.

00:20:36.559 --> 00:20:46.400
You could think that to be kind of on the safe side, you would take the worst one, the fastest growing worst case scenario for your engineering.

00:20:46.640 --> 00:20:51.359
But is this a real representation of how a fire of a single vehicle can look like?

00:20:51.680 --> 00:21:02.079
Because then you may learn that, for example, they had a massive, massive burner underneath the battery, or that uh they started the fire in the passenger compartment with all the windows open, for example.

00:21:02.240 --> 00:21:03.279
That's very common.

00:21:03.519 --> 00:21:19.920
Secondly, to that, if you want to investigate the electric vehicle fire case, we do not have experimental data points for fires which start at the chasey or at the engines, basically remotely to the battery or the interior.

00:21:20.240 --> 00:21:28.720
Most of the knowledge that we have for electric vehicle fires, the data points that we have in the literature, are mostly fires that have started underneath the battery.

00:21:28.880 --> 00:21:31.039
The battery was the place of the attack.

00:21:31.359 --> 00:21:40.960
I understand that if I was doing a fire experiment with electric vehicle, well, I would start it in a battery, that's the place where it makes sense, right?

00:21:41.279 --> 00:21:46.799
But the question is, does the research community skew the perception of the problem?

00:21:47.039 --> 00:22:04.079
Because if all the experiments are done in the same day, uh attacking the battery and the real world fire could start in many different ways in many different positions, especially if we will talk about the spread, which I will cover later, this is quite a challenging thing.

00:22:04.240 --> 00:22:11.200
And secondly, I'm not sure if we ever covered a natural fire development in the battery.

00:22:11.440 --> 00:22:19.200
Because if you expose battery to a two megawatt fire, it's hard to argue that this is a battery fire.

00:22:19.279 --> 00:22:22.640
No, this is a fire that has transitioned into a battery.

00:22:22.880 --> 00:22:31.440
I am not sure if I have seen an experiment in which the fire would have been triggered in the battery and see how that grows.

00:22:31.519 --> 00:22:36.960
I mean, there there have been experiments like that, of course, and the curves would uh sometimes be very long.

00:22:37.119 --> 00:22:43.119
We've done experiments with batteries on our own, and we've seen that they can grow quite slowly.

00:22:43.359 --> 00:22:53.839
As I said, the industry is working, so they're working hard on preventing propagation of fire from cell to cell within the battery module, so that's also a thing that we considered.

00:22:54.079 --> 00:23:02.640
However, I've also seen very highly fast growing fires in the batteries, and some of the people told me the same, yeah, we you know what, we've seen that.

00:23:02.720 --> 00:23:09.839
We we've seen a very rapid growth that took the entire battery pack and the fire was very nasty very soon.

00:23:10.079 --> 00:23:17.920
I just don't see the data points in the literature, and I cannot quantify that, and that that for me is quite a problem.

00:23:18.319 --> 00:23:34.000
So now if we just summarise the the ignition pod and the single vehicle, they are not that different, and when you start considering them as a set of compartments, you can make a lot of sense of what is in the literature.

00:23:34.319 --> 00:23:46.640
And uh when you do that, it it you can quickly filter out the fires that make sense for your engineering designs from the ones that are just scientific research experiments.

00:23:46.880 --> 00:24:02.319
And from the engineering standpoint, the major difference is the fires that would start in the battery and that would grow very quickly, like the fire that actually triggered my interest in this, like very short time between the release of gas to the jet fires underneath the vehicle.

00:24:02.480 --> 00:24:08.799
Now, as I said, it's hard to get the data point for that, but we know those fires could happen and have happened already in the world.

00:24:09.119 --> 00:24:19.759
An interesting perspective from uh fire engineering is that this growth, if it happens within one minute, there's very little things you can do in your car park to really help the situation.

00:24:19.839 --> 00:24:27.200
As I said, my car park, the the one that I was investigating at that point, didn't really work that well in that scenario.

00:24:27.359 --> 00:24:38.799
And the reason is that if you think about the timeline, the fire can grow if it grows in the battery and then rapidly propagates outside of the of the battery and outside of the vehicle.

00:24:39.039 --> 00:24:41.920
You have a quite large fire in your car park very soon.

00:24:42.160 --> 00:24:43.680
The car park has to respond to that.

00:24:43.759 --> 00:24:45.920
So first it had to detect the fires.

00:24:46.240 --> 00:24:50.079
So it it will take you one minute at least to detect the fire.

00:24:50.160 --> 00:24:54.160
You need to trigger multiple sensors to have a confirmed fire alarm.

00:24:54.319 --> 00:24:56.880
Then you need to shut down the HVC system.

00:24:57.039 --> 00:24:57.920
It takes a minute.

00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:04.880
You really have to do it because it's a hazardous to not shut down the HVC, the smoke can traverse the building through it.

00:25:05.119 --> 00:25:07.759
Then you have to open the dampers on your smoke control.

00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:18.960
If you have ducted control or if you're using big fans to exhaust the air from your car park, it takes a minute to open them, and then you have to do it because if you don't, uh the fans are gonna break them.

00:25:19.119 --> 00:25:20.640
Then you have to start the fans.

00:25:20.799 --> 00:25:24.000
If you have small fans, jet fans, it's you can start them very quickly.

00:25:24.079 --> 00:25:30.319
If you have a very large axial fan to exhaust the smoke from the car park, it's gonna take a while to start off.

00:25:30.559 --> 00:25:34.960
So you're looking at a timeline of quite a few minutes before you can do anything.

00:25:35.200 --> 00:26:01.359
Now, I'm not gonna cover this in here in in in depth because I've done podcast episodes on this specifically about uh what matters in car parks, but I'll I'll just quickly tell you that from quite large and robust uh CFD analysis that we have performed, we had a big project where we've investigated 480 different variants of design fire, height of the car park and safety systems in the car park.

00:26:01.599 --> 00:26:07.119
From all of those together, one conclusion was that the height is the most important variable.

00:26:07.279 --> 00:26:10.960
For the exact reason I just mentioned, their timeline is brutal.

00:26:11.119 --> 00:26:14.960
The systems don't even start when you already have a lot of smoke in your car park.

00:26:15.119 --> 00:26:22.240
You have to have large enough smoke reservoir to handle this initial amount of smoke that is being produced.

00:26:22.400 --> 00:26:28.480
If you do not have that, no matter what you put into the car park, it will most likely not even trigger in time.

00:26:28.640 --> 00:26:31.440
Of course, unless we're talking about suppression, then it's a different story.

00:26:31.519 --> 00:26:41.279
But if you if you want to deal with this with a smoke control or some other simpler means, they will not even respond in time to take this threat.

00:26:41.599 --> 00:26:54.079
And the architectural characteristic of the car park, how big it is, is the only thing that will determine, or at least the main thing that will determine how bad the outcomes of the fire will be in your car park.

00:26:54.160 --> 00:26:59.599
I've spent a lot of time in Lisbon arguing for that end, but in the podcast I have podcast episodes about that.

00:26:59.759 --> 00:27:08.240
So in large enough car park, the differences are not that huge, even if you have this very rapid initial growth.

00:27:08.319 --> 00:27:09.920
I'm saying three meters and taller.

00:27:10.079 --> 00:27:24.079
If you have three meter tall car park, then probably the outcomes of a rapidly growing fire to a megawatt or just your classical design fire when it grows to uh one and a half megawatt after some minutes are gonna be pretty similar.

00:27:24.240 --> 00:27:27.359
If your car park is lower, then yes, the differences are tremendous.

00:27:27.519 --> 00:27:30.880
Now, the second part important is propagation.

00:27:31.119 --> 00:27:40.400
So we've wondered why some car parks fires end up with a single vehicle burned and why someone lead to a catastrophe.

00:27:40.559 --> 00:28:02.720
And I had an image on my slides showing a single half-burnt car and some picture from I believe Liverpool where the car park is destroyed, and uh funnily enough, the the single car was an electric vehicle and it just burned halfway, and that the other car park was like probably not the reason not it burned was not electric vehicles and yet it it burned completely.

00:28:02.960 --> 00:28:06.960
So what what's the thing that makes it spread that far?

00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:18.720
In regards of electric vehicle versus combustion engine vehicle, I don't think there is much difference, and unfortunately I do not have data points to to make sure that there's no difference.

00:28:18.880 --> 00:28:24.640
But I think to attack the battery, allegedly, it's very difficult to ignite the battery from outside.

00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:26.880
And we've seen that in our own experiments.

00:28:27.039 --> 00:28:30.640
It's not that easy, it's not that you put a match against the battery and it ignites.

00:28:30.799 --> 00:28:34.799
It's a huge heatsink, it's like a huge mass that you need to warm up.

00:28:35.039 --> 00:28:48.079
The batteries need to enter a specific kind of temperature, we could call it ignition temperature, to propagate thermal runaway inside them and propagate the cascading failure of the battery itself leading to a fire.

00:28:48.400 --> 00:28:55.759
So it's not that battery immediately responds to any heat source outside there with a huge fire.

00:28:56.000 --> 00:28:56.799
It takes time.

00:28:56.880 --> 00:29:03.279
And from this perspective, I would argue that plastic fuel tank is probably more vulnerable than the battery.

00:29:03.440 --> 00:29:15.680
I don't have proof again for this yet because uh as I said, experiments are not really carried in a way that would allow me to quantify a lot of that, but uh I would say the differences in here are not that huge.

00:29:15.839 --> 00:29:25.440
Another thing that I would like to bring is that when you consider flame spread from vehicle to vehicle, I would say you have to get a meaningful part of the second vehicle burn.

00:29:25.680 --> 00:29:32.960
If you consider the vehicle as a set of compartments, it's not enough that you ignite a mud flap or a mirror or a gasket.

00:29:33.119 --> 00:29:47.440
Okay, they will burn, they will have a flame, but this just the sole fact that there is a flame existing on a second vehicle, it does not yet mean that it's gonna fully propagate through the vehicle and does not mean that it's a catastrophical fire of the second vehicle.

00:29:47.599 --> 00:29:54.400
What matters is those big compartments, passenger compartment and battery fuel tank, those are the important ones.

00:29:54.559 --> 00:29:58.559
And to get those going, you need a little more.

00:29:58.720 --> 00:29:59.839
I would say that.

00:30:00.880 --> 00:30:07.599
The fire can spread in the car park through it's obviously a flame spread program, it's an ignition problem.

00:30:07.759 --> 00:30:14.000
For ignition, you need to some sort of radiation and a pilot, or you may not need the pilot if radiation is high enough.

00:30:14.160 --> 00:30:15.279
Where do you get the radiation?

00:30:15.359 --> 00:30:21.200
You get it from flame, you get it from the flame extension underneath the ceiling, you get it from smoke.

00:30:21.440 --> 00:30:25.119
And uh you may also have flame impingement, but that's a different story.

00:30:25.440 --> 00:30:33.680
If you have a radiation from a flame from a plume of a vehicle, the radiation, you can do calculations.

00:30:33.759 --> 00:30:50.079
I would actually recommend doing some classical fire engineering's uh uh calculations of uh the heat flux in distance from a vehicle, and you will see how quickly it decays and how quickly it reaches some values that probably will not propagate fire spread.

00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:54.799
I would say 15-ish kilowatts, that's probably what's needed to propagate fire spread.

00:30:54.880 --> 00:30:56.640
Although I don't have a citation for that.

00:30:56.799 --> 00:31:00.640
Don't quote me, but that's that's what my engineering judgment tells me.

00:31:00.880 --> 00:31:15.279
Now, what we have observed, and this is an outcome of a project that is going on still with uh OFR consultants, we are investigating some of the uh conditions at which the fire can spread in the car park.

00:31:15.519 --> 00:31:23.759
We have observed that a massive contributor to the radiation at the secondary vehicle is actually flame extension underneath the ceiling.

00:31:23.920 --> 00:31:29.519
So that's a huge radiator that acts on the secondary, tertiary vehicles in your car park.

00:31:29.680 --> 00:31:47.680
And also what we have observed is that if you have structural base, which means you have large beams forming the structure of the car park, the flames get strapped in between those beams and then creates a very large radiating surface underneath the ceiling of the car park.

00:31:47.839 --> 00:31:55.119
And we have noticed tremendous differences between different car parks which do not have those beams and the ones that have those beams.

00:31:55.359 --> 00:31:59.599
I th we think that this this effect is large and important.

00:32:00.240 --> 00:32:10.319
And what's kind of interesting, again, if you consider the height of the car park, the higher the car park is, the less flame extension underneath the ceiling you have.

00:32:10.559 --> 00:32:12.400
And it it decays quite quickly.

00:32:12.559 --> 00:32:25.359
I mean, you only have this many megawatts of your car fire in the car park, and if the flames are not large enough to go underneath the ceiling, wrap underneath the ceiling and form a flame extension, then you don't have a flame extension.

00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:29.359
You have much less radiation towards another vehicles in the car park.

00:32:29.599 --> 00:32:35.279
So it it's kind of obvious that we were able to quantify this with computational fluid mechanics.

00:32:35.440 --> 00:32:39.599
The papers are being written, the reports are being delivered.

00:32:39.839 --> 00:32:47.440
Once they are delivered and they're in the public domain, I think I'll invite Mike and Danny and maybe we will be able to talk about this in more detail.

00:32:47.599 --> 00:33:02.480
But again, quick important uh feedback from me, height again matters, not just for the consequences of the first vehicle fire, but on how easily the fire can spread to secondary, tertiary, and more vehicles.

00:33:02.559 --> 00:33:05.680
There are more things that matter in this fire spread.

00:33:05.759 --> 00:33:08.400
Uh for example, do the vehicles exist there?

00:33:08.559 --> 00:33:09.839
Are they parked there?

00:33:10.400 --> 00:33:16.400
There will be differences between the car parks in how much the space is utilized and where the vehicles are actually parked.

00:33:16.640 --> 00:33:22.960
Another thing that matters is the presence of wind or any kind of uh flow field.

00:33:23.200 --> 00:33:45.279
It's important because if you have low uh velocity, few meters per second, two, three meters per second flow, it quite efficiently takes down these hot gases from the car park, actually decreasing the fluxes that you see on some of the vehicles and essentially preventing uh the heat fluxes to the upstream vehicle.

00:33:45.519 --> 00:33:56.160
But if the speed is too high, you start causing flame extension, you know, you you basically push the flame to other vehicles, which can actually be worse.

00:33:56.480 --> 00:34:03.119
And it perhaps explains why some of the worst, largest fires we've seen were allegedly wind-driven fires.

00:34:03.200 --> 00:34:04.720
So they happened in a strong wind.

00:34:04.880 --> 00:34:12.320
So there definitely is an impact of that, but it's like it's not uh a linear function uh that more is better.

00:34:12.400 --> 00:34:22.079
There's like a sweet spot at which the flow in the car park decreases the flame spread probability, and then you enter into flame extensions and it probably accelerates that.

00:34:22.239 --> 00:34:24.960
So flame spread quite a complex problem.

00:34:25.199 --> 00:34:29.599
However, I would say it's a vehicle problem, not an electric vehicle problem.

00:34:29.840 --> 00:34:37.920
From the perspective of electric vehicles, I have no data or proof that to say that they're worse or or better.

00:34:38.159 --> 00:34:41.119
It's uh I think it's just a vehicle problem.

00:34:41.360 --> 00:34:44.159
And finally we reach the consequences part of the talk.

00:34:44.320 --> 00:34:48.480
Uh it's important progress of the talk, single vehicle spread and the consequences.

00:34:48.639 --> 00:34:54.559
Because if you consider the consequences, I like to consider them in three domains, evacuation, firefighting, structural.

00:34:54.719 --> 00:35:03.599
For evacuation, the first part is important, the first vehicle that goes on, the first the course of the initiating event and how the car park responds to that.

00:35:03.920 --> 00:35:24.400
If, as I said, the car park is tall enough, if you can accumulate the smoke that is produced in the single vehicle fire, you may have a robust system that no matter if it's an electric vehicle fire or it's a combustion engine fire, you will be able to contain the smoke and provide available safe evacuation time in abundance to anyone to escape the car park.

00:35:24.639 --> 00:35:33.280
If I do engineering, I mostly care if I am cutting anyone in anyone uh with the smoke, preventing them from reaching the evacuation exit.

00:35:33.360 --> 00:35:46.159
I don't like, you know, dead end corridors, etc., in the car parks because this could potentially create quite a hazardous situation in which a person does not see the fire directly and could be cut off by the smoke.

00:35:46.239 --> 00:35:48.159
So that's one thing they worry mostly.

00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:57.280
But if you just have a large rectangular car park, abundance of exits, they're all well visible, I don't think we really have a struggle with evacuation.

00:35:57.440 --> 00:36:00.880
A different story is if you can have a lot of people in the car park.

00:36:01.039 --> 00:36:05.519
If you have a sports event like the Liverpool Echo Fire, that's a great example.

00:36:05.760 --> 00:36:11.679
There was thousands of car in the car park because there was thousands of people at the arena at that moment.

00:36:11.920 --> 00:36:27.039
If those people were actually in the car park trying to leave the car park after the event, stuck in their vehicles in one giant traffic jam with the fire growing, the outcomes of that fire could have been so, so, so much more worse.

00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:43.519
So I think while I do not think we have uh an evacuation problem in the car parks, if your car park is low in ceiling height and you don't have this space to contain the initial smoke, or if you may have large groups of people in it, I definitely think you need to consider that.

00:36:43.679 --> 00:36:53.039
And you need to consider this rapid fire growth phenomenon with much more care than uh in a very tall car park when I would say the engineering is business as usual.

00:36:53.280 --> 00:36:59.119
In terms of firefighting, the main thing for me is that can the firefighters actually enter the car park?

00:36:59.280 --> 00:37:04.320
If you don't have any smoke control or it's inefficient, you will fill the car park with smoke.

00:37:04.400 --> 00:37:07.840
Yes, it could be lower temperature if you have some smoke control.

00:37:08.320 --> 00:37:10.480
In Poland we call them the clearance systems.

00:37:10.559 --> 00:37:16.639
Yes, it can be a little bit better than if you had nothing, but it's not really providing firefighters an entry pathway.

00:37:16.880 --> 00:37:34.480
Entry pathway to me is something that the firefighters can get into the gate of the car park or enter through some staircase, and there is no smoke in between them and the source of the fire, and there is a pathway from which they can very easily approach the seat of the fire.

00:37:34.639 --> 00:37:41.840
If they can do that, they will very quickly apply water to the fire and they will very quickly control the fire.

00:37:42.079 --> 00:37:49.840
If they enter a car park and it's absolutely filled with smoke, and you cannot see anything, you need to use thermal cameras.

00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:55.519
It's a completely different approach for the firefighters, it's a completely different problem for them.

00:37:55.760 --> 00:37:59.679
How to get into the seat of fire and how to effectively fight it.

00:37:59.920 --> 00:38:11.840
So from this perspective, again, electric vehicles versus combustion engine vehicles depends on how much smoke you generate because that's the threat in terms of how hard it's gonna be to enter the car park.

00:38:12.000 --> 00:38:15.920
One thing that I do not have an answer is the toxicity of the smoke.

00:38:16.159 --> 00:38:22.400
I they obviously do not know if it's an electric fire that's burning or it's a combustion engine vehicle.

00:38:22.559 --> 00:38:34.559
Uh but allegedly the smoke from the batteries will be possibly more toxic due to hydrofluorides uh being a part of the gases that can be released in the fire.

00:38:34.719 --> 00:38:38.800
So that's that's a challenging consideration for which I do not have an answer.

00:38:38.960 --> 00:38:47.679
However, if you design your smoke control well, and there is no smoke at the pathway of the firefighters, then this potentially is not a big issue as well.

00:38:47.920 --> 00:38:51.199
In terms of structural, that was a question asked in the discussion.

00:38:51.360 --> 00:38:57.039
If there's a single vehicle fire, I don't think there's a big structural problem either, because it's a localized fire.

00:38:57.280 --> 00:39:19.679
If your vehicle causes you to lose a column, let's say, and loss of that column causes the car park to collapse or the building to collapse, that's a structural problem, structural design problem, not a fire problem, because the building should be designed in such a way to prevent a progressive collapse and provide the alternative load-bearing pathways for the structural load.

00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:30.000
So I don't think a local, like a single vehicle, should ever cause damage big enough to cause a structural catastrophe.

00:39:30.320 --> 00:39:36.239
A different story when it propagates, then yes, and those fires can be very long-lived.

00:39:36.400 --> 00:39:42.719
So even if you have fire resistance of one, two hours, the fire can last for many, many hours.

00:39:42.800 --> 00:39:48.639
So it's difficult to say you can ever protect your structure very easily for any kind of fire.

00:39:48.719 --> 00:39:51.039
That's a very challenging consideration.

00:39:51.440 --> 00:39:55.360
The question is how much structural fire protection is enough for a car park.

00:39:55.599 --> 00:40:10.239
And the project that I've mentioned with OFR, that's one of the aims of that project, to investigate what kind of structural fire protection makes sense in a car park, how much we need it for different scenarios that are happening.

00:40:10.559 --> 00:40:17.920
So structurally, if the fire propagates to a very large fire, multiple vehicles, you could have a risk of structural collapse.

00:40:18.159 --> 00:40:26.800
Yet if you have good systems, if you allow firefighter entrance, there's a good chance they can prevent that by taking actions in the car park.

00:40:26.960 --> 00:40:33.599
Not an easy answer, and again, not really an electric vehicle problem, just a vehicle in a car park problem.

00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:37.760
Now, how we address those challenges, how do we mitigate those consequences?

00:40:37.840 --> 00:40:40.079
And I have some ideas.

00:40:40.559 --> 00:40:49.360
First, if you can afford it and you're in the design phase, just making the car park high enough is a great strategy.

00:40:49.519 --> 00:40:53.840
If it's tall enough, a lot of the problems get much smaller.

00:40:54.159 --> 00:41:08.800
And uh I see the impact on height when considering how safe it is for evacuation, how safe it is for firefighters, how much it delays the spread of the fire in between the vehicles, helping the structural problem.

00:41:09.039 --> 00:41:13.679
It the height really affects a lot of those fire challenges in the car park.

00:41:13.920 --> 00:41:15.599
Problem is it's quite expensive.

00:41:15.679 --> 00:41:29.360
Like you need to build taller, you need to dig deeper if you want to have a hard car park, and that is a cost and it's sometimes very challenging to convince the investors that this cost is well worth it.

00:41:29.519 --> 00:41:32.960
It's it's quite a challenging discussion, but we often go into that.

00:41:33.119 --> 00:41:35.599
Uh the second part is uh smoke control.

00:41:36.079 --> 00:41:47.760
So by extracting the smoke from the car park, you definitely decrease the amount of energy in the smoke layer, you decrease the radiation to the secondary vehicles and tertiary vehicles.

00:41:47.920 --> 00:41:53.280
You to some extent prevent the spread of fire from vehicle to vehicle.

00:41:53.599 --> 00:41:58.800
You also highly, highly influence the capability of firefighters to act in the car park.

00:41:58.960 --> 00:42:01.440
If they act in their efficient, they will stop it.

00:42:01.679 --> 00:42:06.239
For electric vehicle fires, of course, it's not that they pour water and it magically disappears.

00:42:06.480 --> 00:42:10.000
But for me, the important part is that they gain control over the fire.

00:42:10.239 --> 00:42:20.480
They stop the cascading fire, they isolate the event, then it may take quite long to fight the fire itself, and it's quite a challenging firefighting procedure.

00:42:20.639 --> 00:42:31.679
But from my perspective, the building is safe at this point, and I my work as a fire safety engineer is done and the tough work of firefighter how to deal with this right now begins.

00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:35.440
If I have smoke control, I can help a lot.

00:42:35.679 --> 00:42:44.480
I cannot prevent all the bad stuff happening from the car park, but I think it's a very, very important addition to the car park itself.

00:42:44.639 --> 00:42:49.760
To have a good smoke control, you probably also need to have a detection layer, you need to have uh smoke detection.

00:42:49.920 --> 00:43:00.880
I had some interesting conversations with uh Australian colleagues who do not have detection in the car parks, and I don't really understand why, and they don't understand why we have detection in our car parks.

00:43:00.960 --> 00:43:04.960
That's an interesting uh conversation to be held among the detection people, I think.

00:43:05.119 --> 00:43:11.519
Maybe I'll focus on that at some point because I find it interesting that different parts of the world approach the problem in different ways.

00:43:11.679 --> 00:43:17.679
But in Poland we have detection, it's automated smoke control, and you can make it quite efficient.

00:43:17.840 --> 00:43:22.400
Uh, another strategy that we like to apply is to build them in a smart way.

00:43:22.559 --> 00:43:27.039
It's also something that Paolo Ramos did show in his presentation of the mine.

00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:34.719
Like, for example, if you have to put charging points in your car park, for love of God, don't put them next to your evacuation exit.

00:43:34.960 --> 00:43:42.480
Try to put them somewhere remotely, somewhere far away, like next to the extraction vent, for example.

00:43:42.719 --> 00:43:44.719
Consider the flows in the car park.

00:43:44.800 --> 00:43:51.360
Don't put them in an isolated spaces which are difficult to ventilate, put them in the spaces where it's the easiest to ventilate.

00:43:51.679 --> 00:44:01.360
You can use the strategies of the building to also act on your behalf and support you, and you can use the systems you have in the most efficient way.

00:44:01.440 --> 00:44:07.280
It's it you have to be smart when you're designing, and that's something I recommend to everyone.

00:44:07.519 --> 00:44:10.880
And finally, suppression, that's the best layer.

00:44:11.039 --> 00:44:13.760
We've done some experiments in tunnels with reliable.

00:44:14.239 --> 00:44:19.599
We've seen how effective it is to take down the consequences of a fire.

00:44:19.920 --> 00:44:29.519
The sprinklers will not really be able to extinguish the battery, most likely, because the battery is very well shielded from water.

00:44:29.599 --> 00:44:37.199
So there's really limited amount of ways you can act on the components inside the battery.

00:44:37.360 --> 00:44:53.199
But what they can do, they will take the heat from the smoke layer, they will prevent spread to secondary vehicles, they will create a tremendous layer of safety in the car park that the fire will be not that much threatening to anyone in the car park, not threatening to the structure.

00:44:53.519 --> 00:44:58.400
And once the firefighters come, they can they their job is so, so, so much easier.

00:44:58.639 --> 00:45:02.719
So uh for me, suppression is the best thing you can put in the car park.

00:45:02.960 --> 00:45:08.000
Now, you have multiple tools now, the height, the suppression, the smoke control.

00:45:08.239 --> 00:45:15.360
I would say it's a set of trade-offs, and based on your project, you can play with them and find a combination that works best for you.

00:45:15.519 --> 00:45:29.199
I like the fact that I have multiple things in here that I can put to my investor, and they if they don't agree to any of them, well I don't really have to do the project, which I am not comfortable with because I don't like to uh design dangerous car parks.

00:45:29.440 --> 00:45:33.760
Now for the knowledge gaps, there are some knowledge gaps and some challenges.

00:45:34.079 --> 00:45:41.199
First for me is the initial high energy fire problem.

00:45:41.360 --> 00:45:46.320
Like how big can the fire be if it starts within the battery?

00:45:46.639 --> 00:45:49.199
And honestly, I don't know.

00:45:49.519 --> 00:45:51.360
I would love to know, but I don't know.

00:45:51.519 --> 00:45:55.679
Because the way how we carry research is that we triggered that.

00:45:55.920 --> 00:45:59.119
And what I want to know is how it can naturally occur.

00:45:59.360 --> 00:46:04.559
What is the natural fire of a battery in a vehicle?

00:46:04.880 --> 00:46:09.119
And can it propagate to a massive fire within seconds?

00:46:09.360 --> 00:46:11.440
Uh we've seen videos of that happening.

00:46:11.599 --> 00:46:16.880
I and I don't know how common that is, how often it happens, and how big it can be.

00:46:17.119 --> 00:46:19.920
I am prepared for some fires like that.

00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:27.280
Like if it's a megawatt and my car park is tall enough, it's probably not very much different from my normal engineering.

00:46:27.440 --> 00:46:31.280
But if it's five megawatts, then it's very, very different and it's a huge challenge.

00:46:31.360 --> 00:46:37.519
And I'm not sure if my systems are ready, and I don't feel comfortable not having the answer to this question.

00:46:37.760 --> 00:46:42.960
But you can also rephrase the question because it it's kind of a question of acceptance.

00:46:43.199 --> 00:46:47.280
Do you accept the fact that there's gonna be much larger fire in your car park or not?

00:46:47.360 --> 00:46:50.239
You know, there's a this interesting fire curve discussion.

00:46:50.400 --> 00:46:51.840
Well, which fire curve you should use?

00:46:52.000 --> 00:46:59.679

227 - The differences between EV and ICEV fires in car parks

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