LG Chem announced yesterday that it has finally successfully developed a special flame retardant material with top performance for use in battery packs. The project has been continuously researched and developed since 2009, and the construction of the mass production system has been completed, and it is planned to be officially put into production from 2023 according to customer needs.
The newly developed special flame retardant material is a high-performance engineering plastic material made of PPO (polyphenylene ether), PA (polyamide), PBT (polybutylene terephthalate) and other materials. It can block the flame propagation caused by thermal runaway at a high temperature of more than 1000 degrees, and the flame retardant time exceeds 400 seconds, which is about 45 times that of general flame retardant plastics.
Thermal runaway is the most serious safety accident of lithium-ion batteries. It is due to the internal short circuit and external short circuit that cause a lot of heat inside the lithium-ion battery in a short period of time, which causes the decomposition of the positive and negative active materials and electrolytes, causing the lithium-ion battery to catch fire. and explosion.
The accident survey data from 2011 to 2019 shows that the proportion of power battery safety problems caused by thermal runaway diffusion accounts for more than 50%.