ESN Annual Conference 2023: Fire safety innovation and best practice what does the future hold 

Thanks for the video. I didn't send an email yet, but will soon. From a South African point of view, knowing local fire regulations, we take on board you recommendations for what you identify to be best practice for battery systems. I agree. All you have control over, in your expertise are how your product is stored (e.g.separation) or using the available data recorded to monitor the state of the battery. Now, from a fire protection perspective, the Monitoring and analysis of the system, although best practice, is not taken into consideration because of the reliance on humans to intervene. The best practice from a fire protection perspective is to assign an occupancy classification to the batteries, a hazard classification in accordance with sprinkler protection and lastly a category to the batteries stored in terms of sprinkler protection. In addition, we would evaluate the battery on the content at any given stage of it's life cycle. A battery, when new, will have contents of cathodes and anodes, which are metals, wrapped in some insulating material, submerged in a weak acid solution. In an old battery, most of the distilled water would have evaporated, leaving the content submerged in a strong acid. So, when there is a build up of pressure during battery operation or charging and an explosion takes place, there is a great concern of acid being prevalent. The first aim from a fire protection perspective is to prevent the explosion. We might typically treat a battery the way we treat a gas cylinder. These closed systems only fail because of high temperatures, so we would provide sprinkler protection that will be activated when a predetermined minimum temperature is reached. In addition, the room would be fire separated from any adjacent rooms.