In this complicated set of investigations, I guess we can at least rule out that nuclear fusion is involved. I wonder if he's ever seen any neutrons flying around in his battery compartments? Until he does, it's probably not too much to worry about.

In the unlikely event that he does find some neutrons flying around, then there might be an opportunity to reduce the mass of the batteries (and in fact the fuel tanks) very considerably.

shielding mass
 

Sadly I think the savings in massive batteries would be more than lost in the required shielding.

An acquaintance of mine is a Sandia PhD who happened to catch the job of looking into Cold Fusion back in those days. He once pointed out to me that if some of the more optimistic claims of success had been real observations, the experimenters would have been quite dead of the resulting neutron dose.

attn. cwatters : To a profane observer, an 'assumption' of LENR occurrence cannot be : it must be a scientific 'YES' or 'NO' with 100 % certainty, achieved from gaseous phase chromatography analysis of remnants after a Li-lon battery run-away combustion. If traces of nucleons are found that were not there within the original constituents, OK ... if not, not OK. It is as simple as that, no need for anybody to 'speculate', as Lewis Larson seems to be doing ?

On Monday, February 3rd, 2014, at approximately 10:00 a.m. local time, (1800 hrs UTC), a Japan Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner made its first scheduled arrival from Tokyo's Narita Airport, (RJAA), landing at Vancouver's International Airport, (CYVR).

186 passengers were on board.

Japan Airlines will be making a weekly flight to Vancouver every Monday in February before commencing daily flights in March.

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r...psc4ab4e6e.jpg

Dreamliner
 

Narrowly missing the schoolyard
 

An Air India -owned Boeing Dreamliner was diverted to Kuala Lumpur due to a technical failure during flight, reported Xinhua, citing local TV Times Now

Technical Glitches Ground AI Dreamliner in Kuala Lumpur
 

Technical Glitches Ground AI Dreamliner in Kuala Lumpur
OUTLOOK MAGAZINE
NEW DELHI | FEB 05, 2014

An Air India Dreamliner, flying non-stop from Sydney to Delhi, with 215 people on board, today landed in Kuala Lumpur under emergency conditions after its cockpit panels suffered a software malfunction.

The pilots of the Boeing 787 who spotted the glitch on their panel while the aircraft was overflying Malaysia, immediately informed the Kuala Lumpur air traffic control and sought permission to land, airline sources said.

The aircraft landed under emergency conditions at the airport, they said, adding it was a "normal" landing.

The plane, operating flight AI-301, was coming to Delhi from Sydney via Melbourne.

An Air India spokesperson said all the passengers have been provided hotel accommodation at Kuala Lumpur.

As no Dreamliner engineers were available in the Malaysian capital, they were being flown in from Hong Kong.

With the flight duty limit of the existing crew ending, a team of cockpit and cabin crew was also being flown from India and the flight is expected to arrive here tomorrow evening, the spokesperson said.

Air India's Dreamliner aircraft have been facing a series of problems since they were grounded for almost four months from January last year.

FILED ON: FEB 05, 2014 21:42 IST

Technical Glitches Ground AI Dreamliner in Kuala Lumpur

It would be interested to know if they lost the transponders too.

Reported by another source that the FMC's failed.
Should have been able to get around quite well on backup Nav so I don't see the "emergency"

I'm not suggesting it wasn't a good idea to land at KL however.

Latest reports say all FMCs failed. And the transponders worked.

Sky news reporting publication of analysis of Japan Airlines battery fire on B787:-

Dreamliner Battery Meltdown Hotter Than Lava

Initially I was cheered to hear that someone at fu#$cked news knew how hot lava was. I wouldn't have expected such erudition, but then I read the article, and it turns out that they have no clue about the temperature of lava after all.

660C isn't even close. That's barely warm enough to be the color of crusted lava.

You might want to put a hold on that sense of superiority there aw.

Lava Temp

700-1200C, so 660C is within the bounds of rounding off and is certainly closer than "not even close"...

Hardly startling piece of information, who cares how hot, clearly wasn't hot enough or long enough because the damaged area was very limited. I hope Sky News will be the first to tell us when investigators finally uncover the true reason for the battery failure.

If you think of lava as clay, clay softens and fires in the range 700C-1300C. If you take a low-fire clay and take it all the way to 1300C then it will melt rather than simply soften. It's entirely down to the composition of the rock, so some minerals (often used as glaze) will be liquid at 600-700C. Glass firing is typically 600-800C, depending on the glass.

Lava as familiar from cartoons, and the image of what the report was trying to conjure is red/yellow from its thermal emission. That requires at least 1000 C.

Yes, you can get lava with some composition that flows at 700C, but it's not going to put on much of a show.

How hot it is matters, as the energy coming out of the titanium box and shining around the avionics bay goes as the fourth power of it, given that the battery almost fills the box.

The reporters might be interested in the temperature inside a wood burning stove if they want a scary household equivalent, or the temperatures inside the engines. Granted, those things were designed to get that hot.

Having worked briefly maintaining glass kilns in a number of factories, I would argue over those temps. Typically, in plants producing bottles etc, the temperature mid-kiln would be over 1,000C and in the "fining zone" (the bit just before the molten glass drops into the mould) the temperature would be between 1,200 & 1,400 C. As I used to work on relining the interior of these things, while they were still producing glass, I had to look at those temperatures rather closely. They are hot enough that, when spraying new concrete onto the interior walls (through burner ports), one could work for a maximum of 30 to 35 seconds, followed by a 20 minute rest.

That's probably the difference between pouring glass into a mould, where it needs to flow relatively well, and having it merely softened so that it can be worked by a glassblower or just settle into a flat mould without flowing.

Anyway who really cares if it 600 or 1200 C? a fire is a fire no ?
I remember the answer of a Russian engineer from Ilyushin , when I noticed they used wood on the stairs of their (then) brand new ilyushin 96:
" wood only start to burn at 400 Degrees, Human dies after 100 C, no problem. "

The 787 entered commercial service round about October 2011.
Is there a better way of certificating aircraft to avoid the battery problems suffered so far?