Lithium Battery Failures

[CharlieJ]

Does anybody know of any boats with lithium batteries installed where the batteries have failed?

[CharlieJ]

Bump. Nobody??

[Networker]

Nope. I’m sure it’s happened but I’ve not heard of it. I’m fast I’ve heard the opposite with lead. I’ve heard more nonsense about off gassing, having to fill batteries with water!??? and other nonsense with lead batteries (more than I’ve heard about with LiFePO.).

Stick to high quality cells and batteries made to high quality standards and you’ll be fine. Preferably get drop-ins so if a BMS decides things aren’t kosher, you don’t kill all your cells, just just a portion of the bank.

[tanglewood]

Charlie, I know of one battery pack that experienced a failed cell. The BMS took it off line, as designed.


Is that the type of failure you are looking for, or something more dramatic like a smoked cell?

[MikeHoncho]

I’ve been using lipo batteries in my RC planes for about 8 years now. I’ve really piled up a couple causing significant deformity with no significant failure. The most I’ve seen is a puffed pack or two. The only thermal runaway I’ve witnessed is one where I shoved a screwdriver through one to short it out.

[smac999]

I have seen a few mastervolt lithuim batteries fail. luckily they had a few and just removed the bad ones to continue.

mastervolt replaced both under warranty but it took a while as they are hard to ship

[CharlieJ]

Thanks @tanglewood and @smac999. Do you have additional information regarding these incidents that you can share?

[Cpt Mark]

Sinopoly has a fun video on their website where they actively destroy their batteries for fun. Things like hook up a bunch in series and then dead short the whole mess. Throw them into a fire, drive a metal stake through the battery and even fill it full of holes after shooting them.

In my own case I was top balancing the pack which took forever and ever with the cheap power supply I used. So I connected the battery (4 cells in series) to a std car battery charger to get it done faster. That worked pretty good but only got them partway filled. Hmm, ok, lets hook up 2 car battery chargers. Car battery chargers only go to 12.6 amps or so so it should be fine. Meanwhile, I'm using the power supply on the other one. After charging for a day with the 2 car chargers and monitoring the battery voltage I noticed the amps drop significantly. Awesome! They are at max. Put a voltmeter on the pack and whoops, 14.6 volts. Disconnect. WTF happened? Break apart the cells into individuals and test voltage. 3.3's on 3 of them. 4.6 on the last one! It was then that I noticed the duct tape (good brand, not crap) had split and that the cell was hugely swollen.

So one cell took more charge than the others and was now toast. When the battery hit enough amps in, the amps drop but the voltage goes up. When doing top balancing this way you do not have a bms connected. Never again.

So, charge the cells individually with the power supply at 3.65 volts. 1st one, no problem. 2nd one..... brain fart. Connected the pos and neg backwards. Turned my back and then heard "noise". Turbed around and smoke coming out of the cell. Heavy smoke like a dense fog. Kinda cool to look at but immediately shut off ps and disconnected. That brain fart cost me another cell and my power supply.

New power supply, new attitude. Go slow, it takes what it takes. Connect 8 in parallel and charge them to 3.65 volts. Took 6 days.

I'm in the final stages of installation and looking forward to having these batteries in. Waiting on 2 more cells from China for my 3rd battery build.

Can you destroy LiFePo4's? yep. Just like any battery but they don't explode or seem to catch fire. All good stuff in my book.

[SailRN]

This will be helpful


https://marinehowto.com/lifepo4-batteries-on-boats/

[Corvidae]

I managed to short one of the bus bars while I was installing my bank. Everything kinda seemed fine after that, but it turns out the cell on the negative side of that short was not happy. Capacity dropped from around 150ah to 40ah. They're grade B cells, and a pretty weak batch at that, so not a huge loss, but a lesson learned to be more careful.

[h20man]

Stan Honey... the chap that invented the lines drawn on the tv for targets in football, the way of tracking a hockey puck on tv during a game, the one that painted the lines for the Americas Cup races..... has also converted his house bank to LiFePO4. He documents things quite well on his site: Stan Honey and Sally Lindsay Honey's files | possibly useful stuff from Sally and Stan and http://honeynav.com/wp-content/uploa...oney-notes.pdf . Sally Lindsay Honey (his wife) is an accomplished sailor in her own right.. and has many good safety at sea articles... Great site.. and great info on LiFePO4.....



one of the sites Stan references is: https://marinehowto.com/lifepo4-batteries-on-boats/

[Pete7]

There is a YT video of a pair or Rv'ers who put their RV in storage for a while to go off travelling aboard. Inside meant no solar, so all electrics turned off and LFP left for 8 months. On return the LFP was dead. Turned out the BMS had a circuit board for each cell. On the circuit board a little LED. The power taken for the circuit board and the LED was just enough to flatten the bank completely.

Pete

[wholybee]

I re-built a Lithium battery on a friends boat that failed this past year. He left the boat for several months and came back and the battery was a 0V and unable to be recovered.

I don't recall the brand of BMS he had, but it had a separate board for each cell. It seemed poorly designed and I think the BMS itself was at fault for draining the battery.

There are lots of documented cases of failures on RV and solar forums, including complete loss of RV/Trailers due to fire.

[smac999]

Originally Posted by CharlieJ

Thanks @tanglewood and @smac999. Do you have additional information regarding these incidents that you can share?

One had a bad cell so it was tripping the bms. Luckly mastervolt can run 1 bms per batteries so the others just kept working. With one less battery in the bank. I think the other was a bms or control failure of some sort. In both cases (not at same time). The batteries were replaced by mastervolt.

[ixnax]

Originally Posted by smac999

I have seen a few mastervolt lithuim batteries fail. luckily they had a few and just removed the bad ones to continue.

mastervolt replaced both under warranty but it took a while as they are hard to ship

Please elaborate. I know of no one whose seen a single mastervolt battery fail and you've seen a few. More confusing is that they had a few and removed the few that failed and continued on. Which voltage and amperage were these batteries? I have 4 24V Mastervolt Lithiums so some real world data would be helpful.