Elon Musk to Boeing: I Can Help With Dreamliner

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The seemingly endless saga of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's woes have taken an unexpectedly automotive twist. Tesla founder Elon Musk has dispatched a series of tweets suggesting he can help with Boeing's fire-prone lithium ion battery designs, and Musk should know: his perspective on the technology whose fires have grounded Boeing's fleet of 787s indefinitely is based on his firsthand experience of incorporating lithium ion batteries, from the Model S sedan to his SpaceX Falcon 9 space launch vehicle.?

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"Maybe already under control, but Tesla & SpaceX are happy to help with the 787 lithium ion batteries," Musk tweeted on January 18th. By the 26th, he tweeted again, "Desire to help Boeing is real & am corresponding w 787 chief engineer." He has since spoken out to Flightglobal and indicated via e-mail that, "Unfortunately, the pack architecture supplied to Boeing is?inherently unsafe, and that "Large cells without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect means it is simply a matter of time before there are more incidents of this nature." Tesla's design uses thousands of small lithium cobalt oxide cells, while Boeing's merges their cells into a group of eight large units.

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Boeing chief project engineer Mike Sinnett counters by insisting that his battery design is sound. "I design a cell to not fail and then assume it will and the ask the next 'what-if' questions," he explains. "And then I design the batteries that if there is a failure of one cell it won't propagate to another. And then I assume that I am wrong and that it will propagate to antoher and then I design the enclosure and the redundancy of the equipment to assume that all the cells are involved and the airplane needs to be able to play through that."

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Whether Musk actually works with Boeing on solving their battery issues depends on the discourses that happen beyond closed doors and beneath the radar of public forums like Twitter. But it will certainly mark a curious collision of two worlds if Musk indeed contributes to Boeing's monumental task of salvaging the Dreamliner's tarnished reputation.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/auto-blog/elon-musk-to-boeing-i-can-help-with-that-dreamliner-of-yours?src=rss

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