Study on the Corrosion of Iron by Lithium-Ion Battery Fire Extinguishing Agent - Perfluorinated Hexanone

ABSTRACT

In recent years, perfluorinated hexanone has been widely used as a fire extinguishing agent for lithium-ion batteries in China. However, it can cause corrosion of ferrous materials in LIBs/batteries, such as storage tanks, battery boxes and ferrous connectors, while extinguishing LIBs fires. Therefore, when storing or using perfluorinated hexanone, it may cause secondary disasters. In order to clarify the corrosion mechanism and the structure of the products of perfluorinated hexanone on iron, we designed experiments to obtain “iron corrosion product”. Then the main components of the corrosion products were studied by various chemical analysis methods and the corrosion mechanism was proposed. The results show that the main component of “iron corrosion product” is (CF₃CF₂COO)₃Fe, which is generated by the reaction of CF₃CF₂COOH, the decomposition product of perfluorinated hexanone, with iron oxides. Accordingly, it can be determined that perfluorinated hexanone has certain safety hazards when used as a lithium-ion battery fire extinguishing agent. In order to avoid the above safety hazards of perfluorinated hexanone, it is recommended that when storing and using perfluorinated hexanone, it needs to be protected from light and moisture.

KEYWORDS:

• Lithium ions
• thermal failure
• perfluorinated hexanone
• corrosiveness
• chemical analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC0810901), Anhui Vocational and Technical College Demonstration Course (2022kcsz15).

Disclosure statement

Personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests

Author statement

Wei Liu (First Author; Corresponding Author): Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Writing – Original Draft;

Meiling Kong: Data Curation, Investigation;

Fusheng Zhao: Visualization; Supervision;

Songfeng Yin: Funding Acquisition

Yanhua Sun (Corresponding Author): Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing.

Additional information

Funding

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Songfeng Yin reports financial support was provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.