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Methanol Fuel-Cell Battery For Your Laptop?
Nick writes: "I ran across this accidentally when I was researching fuel cell cars. They have come out with a little methanol fuel-cell battery they hope will be more powerful than lithium ion batteries, at competitive prices too! (well, in five years maybe) Also check out howstuffworks for a great article on fuel cells in general." Beating Li-Ion batteries by a factor of ten is a very worthy goal.
Does this mean gas pumps at CompUSA?
A similar article was posted here before, dealing with Methane batteries for cell phones.
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don't drink the batteries: methanol will get you blind, ethanol will get you drunk.
cheers
It remains to be seen how people will react to having to 'refill' their laptops. It won't take too many methanol spills on the carpeting for somebody to bail on the whole idea.
Batteries suck compared to fuel cells, certainly, but just plugging the laptop in to recharge is about the nicest possible way to deal with power. I know I'd rather carry around an AC adapter than a container of methanol. Further, I don't have to run to the store to buy more electricity when I run out; people may react badly to needing to buy refills.
I love the concept as much as the next guy, but I've been wondering if the practicalities won't end up killing it in the marketplace.
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Hazards incurred by gasoline releases are greater than those of methanol releases, and will persist much longer in the environment.A recent study performed by EA Engineering examined what the costs would be to implement different methanol retail systems. They concluded that a new methanol retail system could be installed for approximately $70,000 and an existing gasoline tank could be cleaned, the pumps and plumbing replaced for as little as $19,000.
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...a previous slashdot story involving Motorola's attempt at powering cell phones with similar methane-powered fuel cells.
I hope you were kidding about that... Methanol is highly toxic and leads to blindness and kidney failure.
Then again, I haven't read a good Darwin award lately....
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Besides, don't fuel cells create a lot of heat?
The benefit is you get lots of drinking water and fresh air while using your laptop! :-D
Someone needs to come up with an ethanol fuel cell, and when you run out, just fill it back up with cheap vodka.
That guy on the bus who plays Quake on his notebook computer just got ten times as annoying!
Seriously though, how do you recharge a fuel cell. The howstuffworks article covers hydrogen fuel cells which you recharge by... inserting more hydrogen. They also make water, bad for notebooks. This prototype looks like a sealed system and being billed as a replacement for Li-Ion, which means it's rechargeable and doesn't leak. "Carbon nanotubes" are very cool but there's nearly no mention of an application to new forms of fuel cells in the literature. This press release is great but... where's the science?
Just curious.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
What I'd like to know is whether these batteries will have a so-called memory. Until Li-Ion batteries became common in laptops, cell phones and camcorders, I remember that you had to completely empty out the batteries before recharging them or you'd drastically shorten their lives. For example, let's say you have a 30-minute battery for your camcorder. If you used it for 15 minutes and then charged it, then from now on, the battery will only last 15 minutes. This can be a little annoying for a camcorder, because if your battery was partially empty and you wanted it full to record some event, you'd have to plan ahead and leave the camera running to empty out the battery, then wait several hours for it to completely recharge. (Yeah, recharging times were very slow on these batteries.) On the other hand, while this is merely annoying for cameras, think of the effect it has on laptops--you'd have to leave your laptop running until it runs out of power and shuts off abruptly. This is a constant problem for computers. Li-Ion batteries are not subject to this "memory" problem, and they also charge pretty quickly, if I know what I'm talking about. For example, the battery in my phone lasts about three days (one if I talk a lot) and takes only hours to charge. (I don't know exactly how many hours because I've never sat there watching the damn thing.) If these fuel-cell batteries are small, don't have a memory, last longer AND have much faster charging times, then I think they will eventually replace Li-Ion batteries.
I suppose that the manufacturer would initially charge a lot for these, but refill kits would appear shortly.
Stefan
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
People, people, people... if methanol fuel cells become a reality, you can be sure they will be fairly well self-contained. If you're so worried about spills, do you were a hazmat suit everytime you fill up your car with EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS AND FLAMABLE GASOLINE?
I grow tired of the "gee that can't work, it might spill" everytime fuel cells are mentioned on slashdot.
I would think this would be hampered by its limited cell life. The platinum catalyst used by the cells electrodes will be poisoned by the methanol.
The basic problem is that the power storage technology has not kept up with the large demands for power.
We need something non-flammable and far less toxic. Maybe a zinc-air solution.
When I first glanced at the title, I thought it said "methane" powered. I just had a bowl of chile beans, a pickled egg, and a beer for lunch. If you could power a computer with methane, then I'm ready to light up a server room full of IBM z390's.
It's a possibility that I could get a Fuel-Cell battery, Lead acid, etc, but the only way I could use it with my laptop would be through the external powersupply connector, which means all the power management tools I normally have would know squat about the remaining time on the battery, since it would think it's running off an adaptor.
Neat idea, but some solutions aren't so straight forward. For now I'll use the charger to run it, and a Tripp Lite inverter to run it while away from home, but in my vehicle.
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Finally, a notebook that will capitalize on the farts from my tacos. No more dead batteries, no more charging at inopportune times. A seemingly endless supply of noxious power. My co-workers will be pleased.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
With a fuel cell, I guess Apple's problem of self-igniting PowerBooks should be REAL interesting soon...
While you certainly shouldn't start downing shots of methanol, it really isn't terribly toxic by comparison. If you got it on your clothes it would simply evaporate. The heavy metal sludge you find in most modern batteries makes methanol look pretty tame by comparison. It also means that the environmental impact of the used up batteries will be far less than current batteries.
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This idea really stinks!
"And like that
Okay folks:
Ethanol - the alcohol that makes beer, wine, and liquor much more fun.
Methanol - the alcohol that, if you drink it, will at the very least blind you and probably do a bunch of other damage to your organs.
Methane - the end result of having chili for lunch
It is not fart powered, and you can't run it on Stoli, okay?
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The one I saw, intended for eventual use in cell phones, was basically what looked like a sandwich of plexiglass and some spongy material. Two wires ran off from the sponge to connect to the contacts for a small fan. You'd take a bottle of methanol, squirt it on the sponge, and the fan would start to spin, slowly at first, and building up in speed as the cell heated up to optimum temperature (which I think was around 50-60 degrees celsius).
Cell phones make a good first application for this kind of technology (as opposed to cars) because the price/performance ratio is high (cell phones are expensive for the amount of power they use) and the performance/weight is relatively low (you don't need a really big stack to drive cell phone). If the fuel-cell cell phone (or even just a widget to replace the battery) costs ten times as much, but lasts ten times as long, is fully "rechargeable" with a one-minute application of methanol (which could come in sealed, disposable plastic tubes, or you could fill it the same way you fill a butane lighter), and has no "memory" problems, then you've got a real winner. People will pay $1000 for a cell phone (they did when the StarTAC first came out).
A car that costs ten times as much doesn't work, because that puts even a cheapie car into six figures. You have to get the price-performance ratio of fuel cells way way down before they become useful for cars. However, for cars, methanol distribution may not be a big problem - some researchers are working on gasoline-driven fuel cells. Not as clean as methanol (which exhausts CO_2 and H_2O), but cleaner than combustion, and the distribution infrastructure is already in place. There's still a price/performance problem, because gasoline-powered fuel cells effectively have a full chemistry lab built in, with three or four stages to go through before the actual power production. They also operate at much higher temperatures.
Direct Methanol Fuel Cells are nifty because they're solid-state. A catalyst (platinum, I think) drives the methanol/oxygen -> power/water/carbon dioxide reaction. They do have problems with supporting rapid changes in electrical draw, however. Typically this is handled by putting them in series with a capacitor. The capacitor can soak up rapid increases in demand, while the cell itself adjusts.
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There were these links:
-
Consumer Hydrogen Fuel Cells by michael with 518 comments on 05:14 PM -- Friday September 28 2001
- Motorola Makes Gasoline Powered Cell Phones by CmdrTaco with 242 comments on 10:19 AM -- Wednesday October 03 2001
- The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy by michael with 450 comments on 10:56 PM -- Tuesday November 06 2001
- Fuel Cells For (Military) Portable Computing by timothy with 141 comments on 10:56 PM -- Saturday April 14 2001
- Portable Fuel Cell Technology by Hemos with 286 comments on 06:52 PM -- Wednesday January 19 2000
Looks like you might just have to fuel it up (nb the motorola story). Just don't be a heavy smoker. [smile]"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Methane, whilst indeed flammable, is odourless. The stink from farts is caused by things other than the methane gas.
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Actually I thought that humans' "farts" didn't contain methane at all. Or at least, I remember hearing that. Cows do produce methane, and since methane is a greenhouse gas, cows contribute to global warming. Does anyone have confirmation of the above or am I mistaken?
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Or have you never seen someone light a fart?
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The waste from a hydrogen fuel cell is water. There are certain problems disposing of the water in a way that will not make the surroundings wet, which is a particular problem for electronic circuits. Current hopes are that the water can be harmlessly evaporated, but at worst, you might need to empty the unit's water waste into a sink or toilet from time to time.
Tim
I guess "Blue Screen of Death" could be replaced with "Fiery Hand-Removing Explosion of Death" in this case...
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Let me give you the lowdown
The real question is would Laptop/Cellphone "battery life" actually go up or would manufacturers just add "instant, always on, hot dog cooking functions."
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Supposedly the byproduct of the reaction is water, which sounds good in principle. But where the does water go? Do you need to have a reservior for the water, or am I going to stand up with a wet lap after a long plane trip?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I know I'd rather carry around an AC adapter than a container of methanol.
Nevermind trying to get something like that through the airport these days...
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Isn't it interesting how the Japanese have an apprantly high tolerance for companies expanding into quite a few horizontal areas. Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of cool things that come from Japanese companies that are better known for more common things like cars (Honda's robot, Mitsubishi creating OS's for example) or the Matsushita/Panasonic company which makes all kinds off stuff. Now we have computer company, mostly, making FuelCell batteries.
Why don't we see these types of things from American companies? Is it a lack of R&D? Legal restrictions on how far they can spread horizontally? Or just a lack of interest? Where are the cool ideas from American companies? And don't give me iPod.
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/03/135020 2&mode=thread
Been there done that.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
Actually, the phenomenon you're describing is related not to the battery's charge containing capacity so much as its charge delivery capacity. This same thing happens to car batteries left on cold concrete floors. The charge doesn't disappear from the battery (well, a tiny bit does), but as the battery cools its ability to deliver the charge decreases. You'll find that if you chill a fully-charged battery, it'll stop working. But rather then recharging it, if you heat it back up it'll go back to working normally.
Of course, fuel cells do work at virtually any temperature that won't damage the device it's powering, so, as you stated, this wouldn't be an issue.
Virg
Two bads:
1.) They're talking methanol, the liquid, not methane, the gas.
2.) Pure methane is odorless.
Bad doggie. No biscuit.
Virg
AFAIK, no good way of producing the carbon nanotubes (buckytubes) for these cells has yet been discovered. They zap a lot of carbon to convert just a few percent to nanotubes, then try to sort the few right-sized tubes out of the mess. So if it can be produced at all, it's going to be very expensive.
Actually, we don't need the Middle East at all. There are the Alberta Oil Sands which are insanely huge, and which just had an advance in extraction technology to become a lot more competitive.
But we add in things like Fuel cells, etc. And then we can let them all go fight each other with rocks and sticks and stuff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Closer to reality is the Ballard Power Systems NEXA power unit, which is a 1200 watt fuel cell intended for integration into OEM devices. 27 pounds, so it's not too portable. Runs on gaseous hydrogen. There will probably be a UPS-like emergency power product based on this.