These incidents have led to tighter regulations on how these batteries are allowed to be transported.įor the purposes of temperature loggers, the IATA regulations mean that you only need to declare the lithium batteries in your shipment, if one of your packages contains more than 5 temperature loggers. In 2010 a UPS 747 crashed in Dubai due to an onboard fire said to have been caused by lithium batteries and other cargo plane crashes have also been linked to fires started by them. The reasons for this classification are obvious, over the past 10 years there have been several major accidents caused by Lithium batteries. Speaking to a chemistry professor as part of our original business developments in technology his opinion was that it is the membranes in the batteries that cause the problems as they themselves can be volatile, rather than the lithium itself being the root cause of explosive reactions, but regardless, they are classed for transportation purposes as “Dangerous Goods”. A favourite science experiment of mine is to simply drop lithium metal into a bucket of water and watch it go! Lithium is abundant in the universe but is very reactive. The major problem that they have compared to other chemistries is their volatility. Lithium batteries have been a revolution for many battery driven devices as they provide a much higher energy density then previous technologies and thanks to their large volume production they are also available a low cost. The short answer is ‘yes, but not too many’.
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