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.

Comments

Just remember:

[mrpotato]

don't drink the batteries: methanol will get you blind, ethanol will get you drunk.

it remains to be seen...

[egomaniac]

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.

Re:it remains to be seen...

[jht]

I think ultimately you'll see disposable fuel cell "batteries", and/or an infrastructure where you can buy a little cheap pre-filled tank of fuel for it, much as you buy a battery off the shelf today.

Only some of the more esoteric applications will have end-users directly filling the tank themselves. But if you think about it, most portable power applications today excepting laptops) use a disposable battery - so that is easy to replace with compact, disposable tanks. I think laptops will have hybrid power systems, with perhaps a Li-Ion battery embedded in the machine, and a small fuel cell to provide continuous charging of the battery - and it'd run off AC power when stationary.

Given the higher power output and density of a fuel cell versus even a Li-Ion battery, having spares handy isn't quite so important. You don't have to stay so close to a refill point when your runtime is measured in days instead of hours.

Moron

[purduephotog]

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....

Great news everybody!

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

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.

Carts Re:it remains to be seen...

[StefanJ]

Prototypes were depicted as using sealed, pen-sized cartridges. No filling necessary. I imagine that screwing them into the fuel cell would break a seal allowing a controlled stream of methanol to be fed into the reformer.

I suppose that the manufacturer would initially charge a lot for these, but refill kits would appear shortly.

Stefan

enough with the spills already!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Methanol toxicity

[sterno]

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.

Chemistry Lesson

[sterno]

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?

Did some due diligence on this....

[nellardo]

I did some due diligence on this kind of technology for a VC firm out of the Bahamas. They were considering investing in a spin-out from the Jet Propulsion Lab. If you check you'll see a dorky researcher holding a prototype and if you go here you'll see a newer stack. You can also read a bit about it.

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.