Quantitative Risk Assessment of Fire Hazards in Electric Vehicle Lithium-Ion Batteries
Keywords:
Electric Vehicles, Lithium-ion batteries, Thermal Runaway, FMEA, Risk Matrix, Battery Fire Safety, Battery Management System, EV Safety StandardsAbstract
The swift growth of electric vehicles (EVs) on the global scale has brought a new dimension of fire safety issues, which are based on the electrochemical characteristics of lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery systems. In this paper, a systematic risk evaluation of EV battery fire hazards is made using standard engineering risk processes like Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Probability Risk Matrices, Fault tree analysis (FTA) and Event tree analysis (ETA). Information in the world EV fire incident databases between 2016 and 2024 is synthesized to measure the likelihood and severity of the major hazard scenarios, such as thermal runaway, internal short circuits, overcharge, and mechanical abuse. The analysis creates a multi-layered risk priority framework using Risk Priority Number (RPN) scoring, which ranks eight major failure modes according to occurrence, severity and detectability. The comparative analysis of the most popular battery chemistries, NMC, LFP, NCA and LCO, provide evidence that LFP designs have better thermal stability with much reduced fire propagation risks. Findings show that the highest-risk mode is thermal runaway (RPN = 448), with battery management system (BMS) failures and separator membrane degradation becoming secondary risks. The article closes with a set of evidence-based suggestions on passive and active mitigation of fire, regulatory adherence, and research perspectives in solid-state battery implementation and artificial intelligence-based battery surveillance.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Chinmay Deshpande, Anurag Ghadge, Avinash Somatkar (Author)
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