Comment by Retr0id
Pressure vessels without a pressure-relief system explode once sufficiently pressurized.
Pressure vessels without a pressure-relief system explode once sufficiently pressurized.
Shorting the battery would probably cause an explosion in around one minute. That's close enough to simultaneous.
From https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/8/11/201
A puncture causes runaway/explosion in seconds. Overcharging takes 13 minutes. There's not good data on a dead short (because it's unlikely during normal operation), but it's going to be between those on the faster end. From personal experience a shorts cause things to get noticeably hot after about 10 seconds, the graphs show that once you hit 60C things rapidly get worse.
A relay may have been required to hold the short as the battery stops supplying voltage.
A battery pouch is a terrible pressure vessel under these conditions. It’s designed to bulge and deform to avoid catastrophic failure. It would need to be replaced with some very stiff material that can withstand the first step of thermal runaway. A battery not submitted to mechanical stress (e.g. by being punctured, hit very hard or shot at) is going to get quite hot before expanding.
Batteries aren't pressure vessels though. Pressure vessels are generally decently large; how are you going to get one with significant capacity inside something as small and lightweight as a pager? Just putting in some plain explosives makes a lot more sense.
Sure, but can you get 1,000 of them to explode simultaneously that way? You'd think there'd be some variation in the time of explosion, at least by tens of minutes or hours, maybe even by days.