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Fuel Cells For (Military) Portable Computing
SEWilco writes: "A 2-3 pound fuel cell is being developed to power wearable military systems for a week." 2 to 3 pounds may sound like a lot, but it gets more reasonable when you consider that it means not carrying a conventional battery or an AC adapter around. Of course, you may not be able to take your battery onto an airplane, though ...
On their site they have pictures of what a fuel cell vehicle gas station upgrade will look like -- very cool!
YMMV, but as long as you've got the documentation, you shouldn't have a problem.
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I suggest that these fuel cells should be used to improve heads-up displays. If you see a fuel cell and pick it up, you can gain more information about enemies when you're looking at them, such as how much ammo they have in their current weapon, or how injured they are. It would be best if, when you picked up the cell, it made some sort of "power-up" sound to tell you that you have in fact picked it up and deployed it.
But if the military is really serious, it would be far more advantageous to begin work on cheap, easily-found rocket launchers. I realize that the hand-held, shoulder-launched nuclear weapon is against the Geneva Convention. But from experience I can tell you that a rocket launcher is far more important to have than any dumb fuel cell. With that kind of weapon you do have to watch out for walls, which is important to remember, because most war in the future is going to happen indoors.
The man-portable generator would power laser-range finders and heads-up displays used by soldiers in the future
...will allow the soldier to be aware of their location, as well as that of fellow soldiers
says the legend on a picture of a soldier with rifle.
The lead sentence says
When 21st century soldiers suit up for the battlefield
More quotes:
The increased power density would allow soldiers to either reduce their load or greatly extend their missions
By then, we expect infantry soldiers to use a variety of electronic gear
Did you read the article?
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Infuriate left and right
um..that's one tenth
look at it as a mathematician, not an english major
rark!
This might come as a shock.. but Hydrogen is not 'highly explosive'. It will burn, yes, but only with the appropriate supply of oxygen. It's not like tnt, or other explosives that are ready to explode; they just need a certain amount of energy to start the reaction.
Hydrogen will burn.. you might think of the Hinenberg disaster? I turns out, after all these years, that what caused the explosive burning of the Hindenberg was not the hydrogen, but actually the coating used on the canvas covering of the blimp. It contained the ingredients for solid rocket fuel (unknown at the time).
Also, fuel cells like these don't have large supplies of compressed Hydrogen; they extract it from a hydrocarbon, methanol in this case I think. It's more efficient to carry fuel, and you don't mess with compressed canisters.
You may not be able to take a fuel-cell-powered computer on a civilian commercial aircraft. A military aircraft is a different matter -- well, some of them are designed to carry bombs..although the bombs are supposed to detonate externally.
I've seen several posts about explosions.
.223 to mortar rounds to 40mm grenades), (and probably explosives if I am an engineer.) I don't think a 3 pound power unit is going to turn effective soldiers into walking ordnance.
First, in battle these guys are carrying grenades, ammo (from
Second, the tank isn't going to have oxygen in it, so why would it explode? It seems like there would be a fireball where the fuel escapes, but that not nearly as big of a problem (like gut wound vs. singed uniform/missing eyebrows.) Not that it is trivial, but there are bigger fish to fry on the battlefield.
Come to think of it; if this thing could power effective friend/foe ID it would be well worth the risk.
-Peter
Why can't they just chain together a bunch of potatos like that spudserver? They could get higher voltages and power density by slicing them thin and stacking them in a tube. Sure, it wouldn't last quite a week and they might need to pay the folks at Pringles for using their idea, but they could EAT the spuds if they got hungry so that would make up for it. I read somewhere on the internet that the military is working on a super high power laser defense system for it's portable kitchens that is powered entirely by army rations. Point defense AND it's tasty! I want to be an army cook just to get to shoot those lasers.
Remember that warfare is "merely" the last step taken when non-violent diplomacy fails to produce the desired effects. War is just another political tool, and the way to reduce it's use is to modify the national objectives and political behaviors.
War is supposed to be the last resort when all else fails. With that as a starting argument, it only makes sense that the instruments of war are as efficient as possible to get the job done in as short a time as possible with a minimum of undesirable disruption to either side of the conflict. Reducing the tools of the world's military forces to knives and clubs (or fists and feet) would simply cause the conflicts to drag on endlessly. Better to get it over with so non-violent diplomacy can continue.
Don't hinder the "science of war", come up with better diplomatic alternatives so war isn't necessary. Then back it up with a really big stick.
Gasoline won't explode "at the slightest spark." Only in the movies.
It will, of course, burn, quite well under most circumstances. But those hollywood explosions are done with dynamite.
Gasoline, you see, burns quite slowly. Explosives burn very quickly.
Hydrogen is explosive, however the cell doesn't run on hydrogen, and it's not a particularly efficient explosive anyhow. It's main potential is for fusion.
Anyhow, the cell in the article uses methyl, poisonous alcohol. Hardly an explosive risk.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
This does make a good target if your a sniper and believe that your target may be wearing body armor. It's already located at about the center of mass for the person so if you actually miss the fuel cell you'll still probably take out your target.
What happens if this thing gets punctured by something besides a sniper, say for instance a little shrapnel. If the soldier doesn't realize it the flash from his gun, or nearby flame, could ignite the vapor depending on what liquid fuel is used.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
These fuel cells are going to get their hydrogen from liquid fuels like gasoline, or diesel.
Seems like it would be a little dangerous to carry a fairly large container of gasoline on ones back while being shot at and dodging shrapnel. These would make easy targets for a sniper, just shoot it with a phosphorus tipped bullet and BAMMMM flaming soldier.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Hydrogen is much the same. Like most any fuel, it only explodes if it is mixed in with the proper proportion of oxidant (eg. Oxygen). Real explosives, like TNT or plastique have a built-in oxidant.
Even so, one point of the fuel cell, in the article, is that it converts methanol to hydrogen on the fly... The reason for this isn't to avoid the volatility of hydrogen. It's so that you have a liquified source of hydrogen fue,l which is far easier to lug around than a compressed-gas cylinder.Just the packaging difference could save you 1-20 pounds, depending on your fuel load.
About 20 years ago at the Ontario Science center, I remember that they did a demonstration with two baloons. One was filled with pure propane, the other was filled with a 1/3 propane/oxygen mixture. Lighting the pure propane balloon gave a nice big flame for a second or two. Lighting the propane/oxygen mixture gave a nice resounding BOOM. Hydrogen would be the same.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It's possible that the processore would 'burn' the CO with free air to produce CO.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Yep, or a magazine full of live ammo, or a hand grenade, or a shoulder fired rocket, etc... Soldiers aren't too unacustomed to carrying explosive/volitile/otherwise dangerous materials.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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I like to watch.
What if the bullet hits you?
I don't have my other links to details now but could retrieve if anyone's interested (i used LW as an example of a wearable computer for User Interface Seminar - i bet the only person in the history of such classes to use LW for wearables example and Abrams' IVIS system for car computers example :)
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Try being a soldier, and carrying that weight. Any of it. Every pound becomes significant, readily...
Karma: Good. I'm hoping in the same way as pizza is 'good'...
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The formula for methanol is (IIRC) CH3OH - a methane molecule with one of the hydrogen ions replaced with a hydroxol group. Ethanol (the stuff in your beer) is C2H5OH, ethane with a hydroxol added. Combustion of either in an oxygen atmosphere releases C02, H2O (carbon dioxide and water). Compared to the equivelent hydrocarbon, combustion of an alcohol gives 1 more water molocule and a little less engergy. High school chemistry was a looong time ago, so I might have made a mistake.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Watch who you are calling a retard. Read the article and do the math. The fuel tank in one of these fuel cells holds about 200ml of methanol - that's about 7 oz. The pyrotechnic effect of the fuel tank going up would be about the same as putting a firecracker in a can of sterno -- the guy carrying it might get a nasty 2nd degree burn, but that's about it. Considering that an infantryman (usually) carries 4 hand grenades, each with 4oz of C4 plastic explosive, as well as a couple hundred rounds of ammunition, a half a beer can of flaming alcohol is a trivial concern. You are only demonstrating your own ignorance - people living in in glass houses shouldn't go around thowing rocks. Try to get your military experience from somthing other than Quake and soldier of fortune.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It's a bigger advantage if you have infrared goggles to see the person shooting at you, then can pinpoint their location with a laser rangefinder with GPS tie-in, and send the target coordinates to your air/artillery support in as much time as it takes to push a button and say "Bravo Two to X-Ray Six, fire mission at transmitted coordinates, Over" That's what the idea of giving wearable computers to soldiers is all about.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Now don't get me wrong: I have a lot of respect for the guys who DO go out and put their asses in the line of fire (Hi, little brother), but it's a job best left to people who enjoy it and are good at it - because it's a HARD FUCKING JOB. I know where my talents lie, and they aren't in humping a pack & rifle around -- I did enough of it to know that I'd be more of a liability to an infantry squad than an asset, despite having qualified as expert with every weapon I trained on. I can (and did) help the guys in the trenches by hacking on systems that gather & distribute intelligence so they know where the bad guys are and what they are up to. Being a REMF may not have the glamor and machismo of being a "warfighter", but they are just as important in the big picture.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Deuterium IS toxic, but not by much. 1/6000 of seawater is D2O.
Drinking 100% D2O will be bad for you.
Once you hit 50% D2O in your cells they can't divide, and you get symptoms a lot like radiation poisoning or chemo.
This page talks about the toxicity of heavy water
A few drops of it probably won't do much, but I am not a toxicologist...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
But there's something vital being missed here:
If bullets are hitting the soldier wearing this thing there is a vastly more immediate problem than "will my electronic device explode?" The questions consuming the soul of the servicemember will be "how can I stop getting shot?" and "who is shooting at me, that I may kill them?"
Somehow, I don't think the wheet! of a round whistling past my ear will induce deep concern for my computer equipment.
//KhM
//Now with bleach!
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
I've been looking for a while for better sources of portable power, and hoping for a project like this. Fuel cells have been around for some time but not sold commercially because they are not commercially viable.
But I've been wondering if there's any way to get convenient power out off the grid that's portable, and can generate the 10-15 watts they are talking about for this project. A fuel cell that could run off typical camp stove fuels would of course do the trick.
But what about a tiny generator? How practical would a 12v generator that ran off camp stove fuel be? You couldn't wear it on your body, probably, but it could still have a lot of other application s for mobile equipment. Anybody heard of one of these?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Bingo. The paint they used was very similar to, I love this, rocket fuel. It doesn't ignite until it hits a fairly high temperature (700C or thereabouts ?), but when it does...
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Dyolf Knip
Not completely correct. Per mole, hydrogen packs a much greater punch than gasoline; something like 5-10x, I can't remember exactly. The problem is that it can't be compressed as much, not even in liquid form (and storing liquid hydrogen presents all kinds of difficulties). So the Joules per mole is greater but the Joules per liter is at best on the order of 1/2 or 1/3.
Other than that, yeah, these things don't exactly pose a huge safety hazard to guys busy dealing with, say, bombs, shrapnel, and bullets aimed at their tender selves.
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Dyolf Knip
I should point out that in Desert Storm the air war, while amazingly effective, really just loosened the Iraqis up (ie, destroyed the entire C&C system) for the guys in tanks to come and finish pounding their asses flat. Nice piece of work, really.
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Dyolf Knip
An Army grunt stands in the rain with a 35 lb pack on his back, 15lb weapon in hand, after marching 12 miles, and says "God, this is SHIT."
An Army Airborne grunt stands in the rain with a 45lb pack on his back weapon in hand, after jumping from an airplane and marching 18 miles, and says with a smile "God, this is THE shit."
An Army Airborne Ranger lies in the mud, 55lb pack on his back, weapon in hand, after jumping from a plane into the swamp and marching 25 miles at night past the enemy, and says with a grin,"God, I LOVE this shit!"
An Army Green Beret, Airborne/Ranger/Pathfinder qualified, kneels up to his nose in the stinking, infested mud of a swamp with a 65lb pack on his back and a weapon in both hands after jumping from an airplane into the ocean, swimming 10 miles to the swamp and killing an alligator, then crawling 30 miles through the brush to assault the enemy camp. He says with a passionate snarl, "God, gimmee Some MORE of this shit!"
An Air Force cadet sits in an easy chair in his air-conditioned, carpeted room and says,"The cable's out? What kind of shit is that?!?"
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Dyolf Knip
2-3 pounds is absolutely nothing when you consider that a full canteen of water weighs about that much. Having spent some time in uniform having to carry all manner of things on my person across all sorts of terraine I can say that 2-3 is *nothing*. What counts most is how awkward these things are and if they can be assimilated into the rest of your equipment. As an aside, my understanding is that the batteries for stinger missiles are both heavy and awkward so maybe these things can be of use in more than 1 application. I don't know too much about stinger missiles though, I was a medic.>:)
I'm not sure what the imperical formula for Methanol is, but I'm sure it's not only Hydrogen. Shouldn't there be other chemicals/elements left over too?
Sounds fair to me.
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1. Fuel cells generate electricity by the action of a replaceable chemical fuel, without the usual intermediate step of burning the fuel to generate heat to spin generators. They are a proven technology and most of the R&D is going into finding ways to use new fuels or make them smaller or work at lower temperatures (say, below the BP of water -- most fuel cells only work at very high temperatures).
A fuel cell is not going to care whether its fuel is H or Deuterium because H and deuterium behave exactly the same in chemical reactions.
2. Cold fusion, which is a scam and doesn't exist and doesn't work. Nobody has ever demonstrated cold fusion. If they had done so they would have gotten a crapload of neutrons, and in all likelihood they would be dead.
This is not to say that cold fusion will remain forever impossible, only that nobody has ever demonstrated it. The current spin on the lack of neutrons seems to be that not only are they claiming a magic new way to fuse deuterium at low temperatures, they are magically fusing them in some new way that doesn't produce neutrons. Sorry, but I only swallow one magic trick per potential scam.
From the website:
As stated on Good Morning America, "It's either, you know, an ordinary chemical reaction that's not behaving the way we expect it to, or some kind of a nuclear reaction...It's neither one nor the other, so it really is just a genuine mystery right now."
A great mystery, all right, except to those of us who know some nuclear physics; but not so much of a mystery as to prevent them from soliciting funds for further "research." At least they are honest enough to admit that what they have might not be cold fusion, but I bet most of their investors didn't catch that disclaimer.
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Slightly more practical, it should be no big trick to take the small 2-stroke gasoline engine off a gas-powered string trimmer and use it to power a small DC generator. Getting a generator of the right scale would be a problem, but you could probably find a permanent magnet DC motor the right size to run in reverse.
Yet more practical, Mother Earth News once ran an article about converting a lawnmower into a portable DC arc welder using a car battery and alternator. This was a very cool project which I wish I had the time to try. You could, of course, use the same technique to power any 12V project. I could see this being used, for example, for a fairly high-power ham rig if you couldn't get a car to the site.
The problem is that the efficiency of IC/SGS-generator production goes down with the scale. The smaller you make it, the less well it works -- which is why, of the examples I give here, only the welder is practical for anything. They're also noisy, require a lot of maintenance, and tend not to run reliably for long periods of time. At the scale of hand-carried portable, they just aren't practical.
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Deuterium operates exactly the same way as hydrogen in chemical systems, biological or otherwise. It is not toxic. Tritium, which can (if it is present) also be concentrated by the process that isolates deuterium, is highly radioactive, and does represent a health threat. There was no tritium in the environment to be concentrated when the first experiments were done, but there is now thanks to the nuclear industry. This is about the only potential health threat I can think of from drinking heavy water.
Except, of course, for the threat to your pocketbook -- heavy water is brutally expensive. That would be one hell of an expensive pause for refreshment if you were to drink a glass of the stuff.
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Just make sure the Chinese don't manage to get their hands on this technology... oh, nevermind, you can't take it on plaines.
The article is talking about a fuel processor, which produces the hydrogen which is then fed into a fuel cell. The fuel cell itself is existing tech, the innovation here is the processor.
Seems to me that this would have great applications elsewhere, say in remotely-located weather stations.
So I guess that's negative nine times the weight of current batteries.
Have you ever noticed that moderators usually knee-jerk moderate comments below #20 down? I suppose I should type more slowly. And they collectively have little sense of off the wall humor, I suppose that's why SpanishInquisition never posts anymore, I really liked him.
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--hongpong.com
I heard a piece on the radio a few weeks ago about an even smaller fuel cell--about the size of a thimble--that could be used to fuel cellular phones... I dont recall if the technology was actually available now or not... I think that hydrogen fuel cells are the only real viable alternative energy source, ballard fuel cells have been used in several large cities to power public transportation for some time now. Another advantage is that hydrogen in its liquified form can be distributed with little modification to todays gas distribution infastructure.
These will not be used in battle for the time being. These are mostly for behind the lines type of service. One example I know of is a active repair utility. You can pull up all the documentation you need to repair a vehicle on the field without having to call or talk to somebody. You can also look at the schematic of something without carrying around piles of papers. And when your underneath something trying to put it back together, its really nice to just pull up the information you need on a wearable computer instead of having to continuously remove yourself to look at a laptop or desktop computer.
The same ideas could be applied to medical personnel. Having a complete online medical resource kit could be really useful when in the middle of nowhere trying to repair bullet wounds.