Laptop Methanol Fuel Cells Promised This Week

securitas writes: "Wired tells us that Germany's Smart Fuel Cell is about to ship the first methanol based fuel cells for laptops and other electronic devices. The company says a 120 milliliter fuel cell can power a 15W notebook for 10 hours, and you can refill it without shutting down."

Comments

It's no more recharging

[motox]

It's a Pit-stop

Infrastructure

[adamjone]

The infrastructure for methanol will have to be vastly improved before a methanol fuel cell battery will ever be successful in laptops. I work as an integrator, and I take my laptop on-site for a lot of the jobs that I do. Most days on-site I work for 10 hours or longer on a system, carrying my laptop from place to place. The batteries drain, but my two batteries usually have the life to last through the day. When I get back to the hotel at night, I can plug into any outlet to fuel up the batteries.

With the methanol fuel cell, I would need to carry extra charges with me. On a week long trip out of state, that can be a lot of charges. With the current security measures in place at most airports, I doubt that I would be able to take them on the aircraft. Now I need to rely on the local shops to carry the fuel cell cartridges, which may or may not happen, depending upon my location.

Also, if I'm staying in a hotel, charging my batteries is free. If I use the fuel cell, I could get charged $3 per day or more for using my laptop. That's not much if I can write it off as a business expense, but if it is for my two week vacation to Alaska, it can get fairly expensive.

I prefer the convenience of using chemical batteries. I can charge from anywhere, and in a lot of cases, for free.

Re:Infrastructure

[benbob]

a lot of people seem to be missing the point on this one - maybe i'm wrong - but it seems to me that the most exciting aspect of this emerging technology is the fact that it is green! plugging into an existing electrical outlet may seem convenient and clean but how much carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere to produce those watts? As for comments about how it is free to charge your laptop in your hotel room i'm sure that the hotelier has adjusted their per night rate accordingly ;) On the point about battery life, i doubt very much that 2 chemical batteries would have lasted for a 10 hour day even as recently as 5 years ago and would feel pretty confident that in the not too distant future fuel cells will be able to outperform, outlive and outlast chemical batteries. As far as infrastructure is concerned, i'm not! (concerned that is!) hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and if i can expand on an idea from an earlier posting, instead of farting into the battery why not piss into it instead? or refill from any of the countless other sources of hydrogen? (shit! I hope i'm not sounding like a hippie?)

Re:Infrastructure

[Medievalist]

/.
Good points, proving that the technology won't be for everyone until the local chemist shop (drugstore or druggist to us Norte Americanos) starts carrying methanol cartridges.

But hey, not everybody can get inkjet packs either - yet inkjets are still eminently marketable.

At 33 cents a gallon USD, vendors can easily put a 1000% markup on the refill cartridges. That prospect should quickly take care of the infrastructure problem in capitalist markets! Eventually, you might see business-class hotels keeping methanol on hand in the same way they stock coffee and toothpaste.
--Charlie

Re:Infrastructure

[PhotoGuy]

Also, if I'm staying in a hotel, charging my batteries is free. If I use the fuel cell, I could get charged $3 per day or more for using my laptop. That's not much if I can write it off as a business expense, but if it is for my two week vacation to Alaska, it can get fairly expensive.

I don't know how you're getting to Alaska, or where you're staying when you're there, but I'm guessing $3/day is paltry as compared to other expenses.

(Unless you're driving from Whitehorse and staying in a tent, that is...)

Seriously, though, $3 as a starting point isn't too bad, and it will only drop. Don't forget that those $300 batteries you buy for your laptop don't last forever; if you ran them from full charge to empty 100 times, I'm sure they'd have a good portion of their useful life used up. I'm assuming fuel cells will have a far longer duty cycle, as long as more fuel is supplied.

I had a Dell, less than 6 months old, whose two expensive batteries are now useless. Maybe a manufacturing defect, but try convincing Dell of that.

-me

Hydrogen on a plane

[JohnPM]

"There is no way hydrogen is ever going to be allowed aboard an airplane," Stefener said.

I think this is an overly dismissive statement. Methanol itself is really just a hydrogen storage method. You throw in some carbon to stabilise the hydrogen and as a result, you produce carbon dioxide when the fuel is used up.

There's a lot of work going on to find non-chemical storage methods for hydrogen, such as sponges or matrices that would be explosion-proof. There's no reason to believe that this won't eventually succeed in a safer and more efficient fiel cell than methanol based ones. It will just take longer.

Re:Hydrogen on a plane

[leuk_he]

The only reason methanol(the stuff that makes you go blind) is (will be?) allowed on a airplaine is because the tax free shops sell a lot of alcohol(the stuff that makes you go silly). And lets just asume a bottle of >40% whiskey has the same chemical properties as 100% bottle of methanol.

This will all end when a big plane crash and high % alcohol drink go in the same heading on a newspage.

It is not allowed now to use any electronic device during start or landing. Why? Just in case probably. It is never allowed to use any device that uses an antenna? why? maybe because they can not tell if it is receiving (mostly harmless) or sending (interfering with cockpit/flight controls).

As security will become more important less and less bagage will be allwod in the passenger area. hydogen or methanol will be less of an issue.

Image a refill of either fuel onboard an airplane. or worse, a refill in an airplane where smoking is allowed. Or worse (in a few years), a refill of a taiwan produced laptop that has been dropped a few times.

also see:
http://slashdot.org/science/02/01/02/1534252.sht ml

10 hours is not much

[joshv]

I can reliable get 5-6 hours with my extended life battery on my vaio under heavy usage. Under typical usage it would go 10 hours.

If battery usage were really an issue with most laptop users, manufacturers could easily hit the 10 hour mark with more efficient/dimmer backlights and underclocked processors (no one needs 1GHz in a laptop anyway).

The problem is that its a rare laptop user that isn't far from an outlet. Sure, some people want to take a jaunt down to the beach to work on The Great American Novel for 10 hours - but those people are hardly enough to provide a strong market for fuel cells in laptops.

-josh

Re:Flamable? [sic]

[n6mod]

This, of course highlights the stupidity of current FAA regs on what can be carried aboard aircraft these days. Leaving aside the possiblity that I'll have an easier time hijacking a plane by beating people with my shoes than threatening them with a nail clipper...

Lighters (and likely these methanol cartridges) are banned on board. Yet I can carry my Lithium-Ion powered Magnesium laptop on board. Have you ever seen a Magnesium fire? Right, but it's hard to light. Now, have you ever seen a Lithium fire? Do you know what happens when you short a Li-Ion battery? (Heck some Apple, and I think IBM Li-Ions didn't even need to be shorted)

So we're all allowed to something that approximates a thermite grenade, but they're worried about nail files. [sigh]

Bruce Schneier was right. It's not about security, it's about the appearance of security to convince the sheeple to fly.