As the United States and the world move toward a carbon-free transportation future to prevent the adverse impacts of global warming, transportation electrification is expected to increase at a rapid pace. That means significant growth in the use of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) over the next decade. However, the fire safety risks of BEVs have not been fully addressed. Dr. Guang Xu, associate professor of mining and explosives engineering, organized a BEV fire safety workshop at S&T on June 16.

The College of Engineering and Computing and the mining and explosives engineering department sponsored the workshop, and over 70 people attended either in-person or online. The workshop provided a platform to identify approaches to plan for and mitigate BEV fire risks. Attendees included vehicle manufacturers, industrial BEV users, fire safety experts and university researchers.

As part of the workshop, the visitors took a campus tour, including Xu’s fire-safety lab and the Kennedy Experimental Mine. They also learned about Dr. Xinhua Liang’s battery-material-innovation research and Dr. Jonghyun Park’s research on battery performance. Dr. Kwame Awuah-Offei demonstrated his research using a robot for emergency mine rescue.