Web application describing the explosion hazards from Lithium-Ion battery vent gas.

• About
• Set Up
• Launching the Web App Locally

Lithium-ion battery failures can lead the battery cell to undergo what’s known as thermal runaway, resulting in a potentially catastrophic fire or explosion. During a thermal runaway event a series of chemical reactions take place, increasing the cell temperature and resulting in the generation of a flammable gas mixture.

The University of Texas Fire Research Group has developed two models to evaluate fire and explosion hazard for lithium-ion batteries. The first model aims to estimate the upper and lower flammability limits, laminar flame speed, and maximum overpressure of the gases released during thermal runaway. While the second model predicts the pressure time history of an explosion. Both of these models are intended to provide a framework for evaluating the overall safety of lithium- ion cells.

To enable our researches to perform rapid data analysis as more experimental data becomes available, a web application that presents the above-mentioned models in the form of interactive dashboards was developed and deployed using Python and a framework for building data visualization web applications called Dash.

Follow these instructions to get the project running on your local machine for development and testing.

• Miniconda: Miniconda is a free minimal installer for conda. It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others.

1. Checkout this GitHub repository

$ git checkout https://github.com/UTFireResearch/hazard-analysis-dashboards.git

2. Navigate to the working directory hazard-analysis-dashboards

$ cd hazard-analysis-dashboards

3. Create a virtual environment named fire using conda. The new environment will contain the packages specified in environment.yml:

$ conda env create -n fire -f environment.yml

4. Activate the newly created fire environment:

$ conda activate fire

This tool is built to use a database built using MongoDB and hosted remotely. In order to work correctly, a set of environment variables are needed to point to this database. They contain the location and access credentials for the database. Contact the database administrator to get the values.

[DB_NAME]
[DB_USER]
[DB_PASSWORD]
[MONGODB_URI]

To set these variables, do the following:

1. In bash (or Anaconda Prompt on Windows), enter the following commands.

$ cd %CONDA_PREFIX%

$ mkdir .\etc\conda\activate.d

$ mkdir .\etc\conda\deactivate.d

$ type NUL > .\etc\conda\activate.d\env_vars.bat

$ type NUL > .\etc\conda\deactivate.d\env_vars.bat

2. Edit .\etc\conda\activate.d\env_vars.bat

set DB_NAME = 'your value'
set DB_USER = 'your value'
set DB_PASSWORD = 'your value'
set MONGODB_URI = 'your value'

3. Edit .\etc\conda\deactivate.d\env_vars.bat

set DB_NAME = 
set DB_USER = 
set DB_PASSWORD = 
set MONGODB_URI = 

4. Reactivate the environment to let the changes take effect.

$ conda activate fire

To launch the web application locally, first ensure the fire environment is activated, then run the following:

$ python dashboards/index.py

To view the application navigate to either http://127.0.0.1:8050/apps/vent_calculator, or http://127.0.0.1:8050/apps/hazard_analysis using your preferred web browser.