General > General Technical Chat
Epsom salt in lead-acid battery
Red Squirrel:
Also just remembered I need to test my hydrogen sensor as it's been a while. The way I do this is a little sketchy, I place a cup of salt water on top of the server rack and put two electrodes in it, plug it into a GFCI outlet. The alert will show up on my alarm screen within a minute and come on my phone within the next polling interval.
There is probably a better way of doing that, but good enough for Canada, and leaves enough time to go out for a rip eh.
Rick Law:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 19, 2020, 01:53:18 am ---That was a hydrogen explosion for sure. I don't know what set it off, maybe a broken connection sparked? I'm sure what happened though is electrolysis released a mix of hydrogen and oxygen which would be in perfect proportions and something ignited it causing an explosion.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Red Squirrel on December 23, 2020, 02:52:37 am ---
--- Quote from: G7PSK on December 18, 2020, 03:50:31 pm ---A few days ago I tried one of those pulse battery chargers on a deep cycle battery that had never been used but had sulphated trough age. There was a very loud noise from the garage late at night and the alarm went off.
When i went to investigate the garage reeked of sulphuric acid with everything covered in the acid and the battery was completely demolished.
I have never seen a battery blow up so completely and I have seen a few over the years.
The charger had also been thrown across the garage with the plug being ripped out of the wall and the casing Brocken. I have tried other remedies for sulphated batteries in the past without much success and this pulse charger is the worst one I have ever tried.
In future I will just recycle the batteries it is cheaper in the long rub.
--- End quote ---
Woah that's pretty crazy. I do wonder as well if this was a hydrogen explosion, though I would not have thought a single battery would produce enough at a fast enough rate to get that catastrophic. But yeah if the charger failed in some way where it was delivering line voltage to the battery or something, I could see it. The hydrogen would build up inside the cells and escape out slowly, then some source of spark ignited it.
--- End quote ---
You need a lot of energy to do this damage, so I wanted to understand it. I've been chewing on it since I saw that photo...
I think two events are at work. Hydrogen and Oxygen mix is ignited causing a rapid energy release (explosion part), followed by an implosion since water takes far less volume than its composition hydrogen and oxygen when separated. It would be bending the casing outward, then as rapidly bending (sucking) the casing inward. What the explosion weakens or broke, the implosion would finish the job and tear it apart and blow it away.
That's what I can think of, but I am no expert. Hope there is one with a more accurate/better explanation.
Learning from this: Venting... It is far more importing than I originally considered.
G7PSK:
I dont think there was a shorted cell as the battery had a high resistance from sulphating it had never had any load as it was an unused one and there is no sign of sludge at the bottom of the cells, not that I could have seen any before the battery blew up but there was no indication of sludge from the explosion and no sludge in any cell afterwards. Whenever I have had batteries blow up in the past it has always just been an end cell nothing like this one.
As some has said it could be that the switching charger went short and put the full 240 volts through the battery, I will have to get the charger out of the scrap and try testing it.
james_s:
I would bet that what happened is an open circuit developed somewhere and the current from the charger created a spark when the circuit opened or perhaps multiple sparks from an intermittent connection. I had a car battery go open circuit just a few years ago, it was fine when I parked the car one day then I got in to go to work the next morning, turned the key and nothing, later testing showed it was completely open somewhere internally.
A mix of hydrogen and oxygen is extremely explosive, try it with the soapy water like I did and see for yourself, the tiniest bubbles will make a snap similar to those "pop its" things you throw on the ground and they go bang. Larger bubbles will make quite a bang, and the volume inside a battery like that is orders of magnitude larger. A party balloon filled with hydrogen/oxygen mixture might blow out the windows if it ignited inside a closed room. It's really powerful stuff. If it wasn't so trivial to make you can bet it would be outlawed.
coppercone2:
it has low density so its not very destructive compared to outlawed things
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