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Self-Heating Can
nickprecision writes "Ontro has been working for a while, and they are about ready to get to the public market. Quite a nifty little self-heating can... imagine the uses. Read up so you know about it when your friends pull one out on the ski hill."
Just a sidenote - in Europe (well - London) Nestle already sell similar cans of self heating coffee. Works quite well - shame about the taste of whats in the can though. I can't remember the reactants - but the oxidser is diluted hyrogen preoxide.
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function! Good for camping trips, perhaps, but not in the roadside service station where they were selling it: you can buy normal fresh coffee for the same price and get a seat and newspaper to go with it...
As someone who did read the web site, I can say that the product they have produced, is virtually identical to the nescafe coffee cans other posters have mentioned.
According to the Ontro web site, they got the idea from similar products released in the early 1990s. Those ealry products had flaws, such a bulkiness, which Ontro wished to overcome.
Admitedly those early products (at least those released in the UK - there was a spate of self heating and self-cooling products released on a trial basis in the early 90s) did suffer from the flaws the Ontro founders identified. However, the product currently available from Nescafe, is a complete redesign of those early ideas, and has overcome the flaws in a very similar way to the Ontro product.
Ontro state that their product is 16oz in size, holding 10oz of beverage, and that it heats up within 5 minutes after pressing a button on the base, and stays warm for around 20 minutes.
The nescafe self-heating coffees are more or less the same size, stay warm for the same length of time, and heat up in around 3 minutes.
Nescafe and Ontro have produced solutions to the same problem, and ended up with very similar products.
I think that you should consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, some of the people who posted about the Nescafe products in the UK, actually did read the Ontro web site, and were commenting on the fact that the current UK product is virtually identical to the Ontro product and has been available for some time now, but is a different product to those available in the early nineties.
Personally I wish Ontro every success, as I would love to see the technology become more widespread (and cheaper), and I doubt that Nestle will take their product much further.
The one flaw that still remains (IMO), is the weight of the cans. They always feel as though there is some drink left, despite being empty.
www.vurt.co.uk
The concept of a self-heating container is not new. Armed services personnel used a self-heating can introduced in 1939 that relied on the burning of cordite to provide the thermal energy.