Dustin Gilson Clarke and Jon Turner of Avon Protection discuss how LiFePO₄ batteries are improving the safety and reliability of thermal imaging cameras for firefighters
Firefighting demands equipment that performs reliably in the most extreme and unpredictable conditions.
Central to this is safe, high-performance battery technology: lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄) batteries, which provide maximum safety for firefighters thanks to their chemical stability, thermal resilience and non-toxic nature.
LiFePO₄ batteries also offer practical advantages over standard lithium-ion technology, beyond their safety and reliability.
Dustin Gilson Clarke, Business Development Manager for Thermal Imaging, and Jon Turner, Technical Authority on TICs at Avon Protection, explain how these advantages translate into real-world benefits on the fireground.
LiFePO₄ batteries are being recognised for safety. Why does the chemical stability and thermal resilience make them an ideal firefighting application?
Jon Turner: They’re quite resilient to thermal runaway.
If you take a conventional lithium‑ion battery, once it gets hot you can’t stop it.
It will get hotter, burst into flames and eventually explode.
If you’re talking about a large battery or lots together, you get a cascade effect that when one cell goes, the next one will go and so on.
That’s why you see videos of scooters exploding, because they’ve got a battery pack that’s made-up of lots of traditional lithium-ion cells and any damage to one cell will make all of them go.
You can’t spray water or foam on it, it will just burn until it’s finished.
With LiFePO₄, it doesn’t suffer the thermal runaway.
If you damage it or short it out it could get hot temporarily, but then cool down.
How does LiFePO₄ technology reduce the risk of fire‑related incidents and what made you choose them for the camera?
JT: They’re not prone to self-ignition and to undergo thermal runaway, and it’s the thermal runaway which causes fires.
If you take something like a mobile phoneand bend it in half, the chances are when you put it down, you’d feel it starting to get hot after a while.
There would then be some smoke followed by a sort of fireball explosion.
If that device had been fitted with a LiFePO₄battery, potentially that just wouldn’t happen.
It would not undergo that thermal runaway.
In terms of why we would use it in a camera, we know it is going to be treated harshly.
During testing we deliberately do things to see whether we can induce anything bad to happen, the sort of things you’d traditionally do on a of more commercial type product.
But nevertheless, there are a lot of cameras out there that still use those traditional cells.
I’m not criticising them, but I feel more confident in our technology.
In emergency scenarios, non‑toxic and eco‑friendly battery chemistry can be critical. How does LiFePO₄ protect firefighters from harmful fumes?
Dustin Gilson‑Clarke: Firefighters already face enough hazardous chemicals at the scene but with this you’re not going to get thermal runaway from the battery whilst being used in that environment.
That’s the safety part of it and that’s why it has its own certification.
What advantages do LiFePO₄ batteries offer in terms of cycle life and reliability?
JT: The primary use of aLiFePO₄battery is long life applications, so you can charge them at least 2000 times without really seeing much degradation in the battery.
Whereas you’re going to start seeing degradation in a conventional lithium-ion battery after around 500 charges.
If I can equate this back to something like a mobile phone, after about two years the battery does not behave the same as on the day you bought it.
It still works, but its capacity has dropped off and it will continue to drop off.
With LiFePO₄, they’re a lot more stable and very resilient.
So, if you compare that to a nominal 500, that really is pushing the life span.
How do LiFePO₄ batteries perform under extreme heat conditions?
JT: They are a lot happier to still operate fully in high temperature conditions.
With lithium-ion, there’s this magic point at which it will go into thermal runaway and it will just get hotter and hotter.
Whereas the LiFePO₄shouldn’t ever reach that point.
It’s very resilient to any reactions like that.
In terms of performance, they’re very good and don’t degrade very much at all at high temperatures.
What feedback have you received so far?
DGC: Many end users may not notice a major difference between LiFePO₄ and standard lithium-ion batteries.
To them it’s all about the practicality and the fact that it can be mounted on the outside of the camera is a big benefit.
Adding to that, swapping these batteries out whilst wearing the fire equipment and fire gloves is also a big advantage.
It’ll probably take around three to four hours to fully charge them, but what that gives them is eight hours of operating time, because they’re able to take the camera with them and the spare battery in their pocket.
Swapping is easy, and within 5 seconds you’ve changed the battery and you’re up and running.
When you see a lot of the other cameras in the market that don’t have the certification we have, the battery must be done on the inside of the camera which means five seconds to swap could be five minutes.
It gives you a lot more flexibility on how the end user uses it.
JT: Just to pick up on that point, that is a mandatory requirement.
If you want to make a camera to meet the NFPA specification, it has to be locked into the camera with a tool that’s kept outside of the incident.
Not all cameras have to be made to the NFPA certification.
But it is the only true certification process that exists for thermal cameras for firefighting.
But everything that’s in there is in there for a well thought out reason.
It’s important that you should not allow people to remove a battery from a camera in a scene, either deliberately or accidentally because whenever you disconnect the battery from something, if it’s live, you’re going to generate a spark.
If you happen to be in the wrong sort of environment, that spark could be the last thing you see.
Hence our cameras are certified and tested externally to make sure that any chance of a detonation of explosive gas can when the battery is connected or disconnected from the camera.