How to stop EV fire? This is one question that is killing the electric vehicle industry in India currently. A company MakerMax claims to have come up with a device that will alarm before a battery gets close to the burning stage.
If you are an active social media user, you must have come across various videos of electric scooters smoking heavily and then catching fire instantly. As of now, four big instances of e-scooters catching fire have been captured on camera with many un-reported cases occurring all across the country.
Injuries and one death caused by these fires have urged the central government to deputize a team to probe into these incidents, submit the report and develop a strategy as well as SOP to handle EV fires.
Now, a company named MakerMax – have come forward and have announced that they have developed testing devices and algorithms that can ‘Arrest’ battery fires before they happen.
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MakerMax is a Canada based start-up, founded by an ex-Tesla R&D engineer Mr. Akshay, which is focusing on battery safety and are creating products and courses aimed to ‘take the guesswork out of battery safety’.
MakerMax explains their newly created device – M201 – creates a benchmark data of any battery it is connected to by accurately and quickly capturing the 5 vital internal characteristics within minutes. These measurements are taken at multiple touchpoints such as at the factory, warehouse, dealer end and servicing from day-1 to the end of the life of the battery.
These reference databases then can be used for predicting the abnormal behaviour, deterioration, and safety index of any battery by comparing its vital characteristics with the benchmark through the algorithms developed by the company.
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Commenting on the development, Mr. Akshay (Founder-Director of MakerMax) said –
“While everyone is desperately trying to find answers through safer Chemistries, advanced BMS, battery cooling mechanisms, etc, the EV universe has yet not been able to find a perfect solution to thermal runaways and battery flares that once started cannot be contained through BMS, fuses or cut-offs. We at MakerMax help design the system and the devices to predict the battery behaviour and forewarns the users about the likelihood of an impending disaster as well as forewarn users to save property and life in case of an actual fire.”
Additionally, MakerMax says they collaborate with the battery manufacturers to place their specially designed Pressure, Temperature, and Gas sensors at the vulnerable zones in the battery to create 3-levels of “Wi-Fi enabled audio-visual alarm system” that can depict the Cautious, Serious, or Dangerous condition of the battery.
This system works in tandem with the benchmark data of thousands of batteries that are periodically checked by the M201 device.
