Understanding the Risk of Lithium Ion Battery Fires

Lithium ion battery (LIB) fires are a growing problem that extends across the supply chain, including mining, production, warehousing, shipping, and waste disposal, as well as the consumer side. But data on such fires is fragmented and mostly incomplete. Many are secondary data sources, and for the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission data sets identification of LIB fires is difficult. Some information about LIB fires was estimated from the data sets including typical time of day, time of year, room of house, relative severity, and time trend. Multiple independent data sources make it possible to estimate numbers on some types of fires by identifying the number of such fires that appear in both data sets using the Capture-Recapture method. Detailed results and uncertainty analysis are in the report at https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.TN.2365. This release details the data and methods used to attain the results in that paper.