At this time we have presented our poster boards and our original work to people for the first time. This means now our final products need to be underway. However, this may be a problem for me.
My final product is a very hot topic in fire safety and prevention. I am coming up with a way to extinguish lithium ion battery fires, specifically in electric cars. There is lots of articles that refute each other and give me opposing views so I decided to reach out to chemists. I emailed the AP Chemistry teacher at FHS, the regular Chemistry teacher at FHS, the contact for a virtual simulation that can run simulations with different chemicals and thermodynamics, and asked my brother to contact his chemistry professor about possible starting points. I am doing all of this to get a foothold on what chemicals I should start looking into and I can ask this because I finally decided how I want to fight this type of fire, heat suppression.
These batteries main issue is re-ignition and their unique properties such as creating their own oxygen. Due to this, the best way to combat this problem is to reduce the temperature of the batteries to where they won't re-ignite and essentially freeze the thermal runaway from reoccurring. The batteries undergo exothermic reactions (gives off heat) which makes them get very hot very fast, so understandably endothermic reactions (absorbing heat) would be the best way to combat this. I am thinking about contacting possible chemistry labs to see if they have any ideas where to start researching. Other than that, I just need to keep pushing on, but I know I am getting close to a possible solution.
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