Normally brass is great for electrical use but not when it's around a Lead Acid battery! The ever present traces of acid will quickly ruin it. The funky green that you see around terminals is copper sulphate, the product of the sulfuric acid attacking copper in the wires. Copper, of course, is a primary ingrediant of brass! Lead Acid battery terminals, posts and clamps are made of lead for exactly that reason! Sulfuric acid only attacks it slowly.
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KaBOOOOM---and the M1009 is dead
- Thread starter YellowHammer
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First, It's not the acid that reacts with the aluminium in Draino to produce hydrogen gas. It's the lye (sodium hydroxide) which is the MAJOR ingredient of Draino! If you don't believe me put nothing put Draino (with aluminium) in a glass and add water and watch! Aluminium isn't necessary for the operation of Draino, the manufacturer added it because it produces bubbles and it makes the consumer think it's doing something! If you studied high chemistrey you'd know that lye reacts with fats to form soaps. That's how it clear drains, a primary cause of clogged drains is congealed non water soluble fats. The lye in Draino converts those to water soluble soaps. BTW the reaction product of water, lye and aluminium is hydrogen gas and sodium aluminate, go look it up.
Second, you're not going to get a "thermite reaction"! Thermite is very hard to ignite (speaking from experience!) and you DON'T have a high enough temperature for that to happen. Especially with it wet!!! What you MIGHT get would be would be an electro-chemical reaction due to the difference in the electromotive potential of the different metals. This is the exact same thing that happens when you have dissimilar metals in contact with each other. For example, I'm sure that we've all seen what happens to aluminium in contact with steel when it gets wet, especially when it gets wet with water containing an ionized compound such as the salt in sea water! In other words, any reaction that you get would be exactly the same as that of getting sea water on your engine!
markinnh
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um...seems silly for me to ask this, but isnt there usually something wrong to have the battery just blow up on its own? Im only 47, but have never seen one just blow up for no reason.
ida34
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The positive terminal looks way to close to the hold down. Hard to tell but I would say this might have provided a spark. Look for evidence of an arch on the hold down or the cable end. The hold down is rubber covered but if there was contact vibration could have worn down the rubber until a small connection was made. Sorry for you explosion.
Bobert
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I had a battery blow up on me once, accidentally set put a wrench down across both terminals. It welded down and I got about two hits with the flashlight and boom. It was very loud and splashed acid all over. Got all over me and turned my carhartt coat into swiss cheese. I washed it before using baking soda and that made it a lot worse.
The only silly question is the one that you didn't ask! Yes, you are correct, there IS something wrong to cause battereis to blow up for no external reason. The explosions are due to the POOR quality of the recently made batteries.
Lead Acid batteries use plates made of lead and lead peroxide and an electrolyte (the liquid) that is a mixture of sulfuric acid and water. When batteries are charged some the water in the electrolyte is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. (In the old days you had to periodically add water to batteries to replace that that was lost.) Hydrogen of course is very flammable and oxygen is a great oxidizer so when the two are mixed you've come a bomb just waiting for a spark to set it off! The problem is that most batteries are now "sealed" which means that there's no way for the two gasses to escape so they're just sitting there waiting. One of the reasons that they seal batteries is to prevent the escape of acid fumes. In the old days it was common to see cars and trucks completely eaten away around the battery! The next problem is that the manufacturers are making the plates in the batteries very thin in order to (1) save material and (2) make the battery smaller and lighter. They're also putting the plates closer together and not leaving any empty space in the bottom of the battery for dead plate material to accumulate. In LA batteries it's normal for the plates to slowly break down and shed some of their surface material. But as a result of all these factors what's happening now is that (1) the shed material is piling up until it reaches the bottom of the positive and negative plates and causing a short, (2) the plates are warping and shorting against each other and (3) the shed material is simply falling and touching both plates and causing them to short together. The end result of any of these is that the battery suddenly goes dead and IF the short occurs above the electrolyte level then it is almost certain to create a spark or at least a hot spot capable of igniting the hydrogen and oxygen gasses. Hydrogen by itself would mostly burn (very rapidly!) much as what you've seen in the movies of the Hindenburg fire but when mixed with oxygen it becomes a fuel-air bomb and goes BANG!
FYI. The manufactures discovered years ago that adding Calcium and Arsenic to the plates causes the hydrogen and oxygen to recombine. (When they recombine they give off heat, that's why your batteries gets hot when you charge it.) That fact allowed them to build "sealed" lead acid batteries because now you didn't need to add water to them every few weeks. I don't know, but I suspect that the manufactures have recently cut back on the amount of Calcium and Arsenic and that that's part of the reason why recent batteries seem to be accumulating Hydrogen and Oxygen which leads to explosions.