As it has been well disclosed in several media, during the Formula E tests in Valencia there was a problem involving a battery.
At the moment, the few pieces of news that have leaked that are fairly well founded are that the battery had a malfunction on the track, forcing the driver to park the car on the side of the track.
Then the car was taken with the tow truck to the garage, the team mechanics proceeded to dismantle the faulty battery to replace it with another and take the faulty battery to the WAE garage (all the batteries are the same for all the cars and they are all produced by Williams Advanced Engineering).
In the WAE box there is a white curtain inside which the batteries are opened and need to be opened for further checks.
The battery in this case no longer communicated so it had to be opened to check the electronics.
During the opening operations, a blaze developed which involved and burned the tent, producing thick black smoke. The operator was taken to hospital for checks and discharged the same afternoon. The fire was put out in a few minutes by the staff present. on the circuit and the battery was moved to the outdoor pitlane, all in all in good general condition (subsequently the battery was dismantled and sent for analysis to the WAE headquarters in the United Kingdom).
The investigations after 24 hours are still underway to understand exactly the dynamics and to understand whether it is an isolated case due to a procedural error, an isolated case due to a defect of the single battery or something that can potentially concern all the batteries.
The batteries for Season 10 are the same batteries used for Season 9 which were serviced and repaired during the break between the two seasons.
Let’s look at the various possibilities that could have happened.
Normally during races the Formula E batteries transmit a lot of data via telemetry and are constantly monitored by WAE. We don’t know if the system was in operation here in Valencia, however as far as we know the driver stopped due to an unsafe malfunction for a radio order from WAE. This would seem to suggest a real break inside the battery (after the machine stopped the battery no longer communicated data).
Unfortunately, not all potentially dangerous situations can be intercepted. Good practice would include temperature sensors for each individual cell. Unfortunately this is not always possible and in the case of a faulty or incorrectly connected cell, overheating may go unnoticed, however in the case of cell overheating the fire develops immediately, not after hours. Furthermore, it is not certain that the reason for the stop and the reason for the fire are the same.
The batteries are liquid cooled, normally a mixture of water and glycol is used like normal petrol engines, however glycol is flammable and in the event of a leak inside the battery a flammable atmosphere is formed which can be triggered by from sparks due to both workmanship and defective components
The main questions that will allow us to understand exactly what happened are quite limited in number.
- Was telementria working?
- Were incorrect values recorded before the stop on the track?
- Does the battery have temperature monitoring on all cells?
- Does the battery have a busbar mapping system to detect anomalies in the power wiring?
- Is coolant flammable when in vapor form?
- Were there any sparks when opening the battery due to normal disconnection of the wiring?
- Were there sparks during the opening of the battery due to incorrect manoeuvres?
- Have there been short circuits on the cells due to incorrect operations?
- Was the fire due to the cells or something else?
When the full report is released we will likely have all questions answered.
#simonerambaldi #theEMNteam
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