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So Where Are The Fuel Cells?
prostoalex writes: "While fuel cells have been touted as a revolutionary innovation for the electronics industry, they have not hit the market yet. This article in eWeek talks about the current problems with fuel cells, and claims that 'these devices, designed to last as much as 10 times longer than a standard lithium-ion battery, should hit the market by 2004.'" There are a few fuel-cell devices on the market, but this article points out a few reasons they're not yet more widespread.
The real reason they won't release fuel cells isn't because of problems. The article itself says they last 10x longer than a regular Li. Duh. They won't release them because then noone will want the older batteries. Then they can't gouge the fuck out of us at the register (those things are damned expensive for all the longer they last in my DC3200).
/. knows what the god damn Smithsonian is! (And I looked for Edison, and I didn't see anything about a "super long-life bulb" there.)
/. (It's unlikely though--the government has, historicaly, gotten the best innovation through competition of private companies, and the public-known computational power of the US gov't is allready among the best in the world.)
That implies collusion in the market. Trust me--if a company could make a standard-form-size fuel cell, they'd sell them and blow the pants off of their competition. If a company could put them in their laptops with no problems, they'd do so and sell the pants off of their "twelve-hour laptop with no weight increase."
Edison invented a light bulb that will last 10x longer than even today's four and five year bulbs. You can go to the Smithsonian [smithsonian.org] and see it for yourself. But why won't GE and Sylvania, or even Philips, spit one out on the consumer market? Because then they couldn't rope us into buying the nasty bulbs that don't last very long at all. We buy more, they make more money. Simple as that.
Sheesh. If you're going to post a link, find a relevant page and then post that. Everyone who reads
But let me take your statement as true--there are at least two alternate possibilties as to why it's not in the mass market. One: It's too god damn expensive / ineffecient. If the bulbs only put out a max of 10 watts, they're useless; if the bulbs cost $100 each, they're useless. Two: If you take a modern lightbulb, under-whatt it, and never turn it off, it'll last for a god damn long time.
And I'm sure the government has computers that far outdo anything that any PC or Server that's commercially available could do. When will we see that kind of power? When they decide that they don't have to charge $10G for a toilet seat to cover this stuff (aka none too soon).
I don't even know where to start picking that one apart....
The government no doubt has the most powerful computers in the world; it's even possible that they have black-project chip designs that far outpace anything heard about on
As for the $10,000 toliet seat--that was the military paying for a seat on a battle-craft (not sure if it was naval or air force.) And I think it was a case of corruption / fraud, to boot.
The automobile industry is not in cahoots with the oil companies to keep back fuel-efficient cars. Intel and AMD are most ceratinly not in cahoots to keep real chip power down (if Moore's law suddenly stopped, sales would collapse. If Moore's law could be leapfrogged, they'd do it to beat the other.)
Fuel cell producers are not--I repeat, not--purposfully sabatoging their work for fiscal gain. Selling a new car to every family in America of a brand-new, patented design could make or break any car company. Once one goes to market, everyone else is going to have to pay catchup or try and leapfrog. (Hybrid cars are just a stopgap measure, because the converters to get hydrogen from gasoline are rediculously expensive.)
We live in a capitalist civilization. If there's a real good out there that can be built that will out do what the other guy is making in all measurements, it will be built. If fuel cells aren't sitting in our laptops yet, there are a dozen easy ways that someone with just a high school diplomay could figure out, aside from willfull obstruction, as to their not taking off in the market. Heck, read the rest of the posts on this article, and you'll find plenty.
You're probably thinking mainly of the Hindenburg disaster when talking about something with hydrogen in it exploding. The problem with that is, A) the Hindenburg didn't explode, and B) it is highly unlikely that the fire that did consume the craft was caused by hydrogen being ignited by a spark. I got this from my dad and then later saw a report on it on PBS. Through a quick search on Google, I found the most relevant page I could, here.
The gist of it is that the skin of the Hindenburg was made of fabric and coated with laquers and metal based paints, and the material itself was highly flammable. (The guy on the PBS documentary had a piece of the original fabric and showed how nicely it burned.) That's why the entire surface of the dirigible burned within seconds and it crashed to the ground, and that's also why it burned with a bright orange flame. A hydrogen flame is nearly invisible in daylight; in darkness it's a pale blue. Hydrogen is lighter than air, thus always burns upwards, not in all directions. The long and short of it is that there were many indicators that a few thousand observant engineers and scientists over the decades should have picked up on, that should have told them their assumptions about hydrogen's involvment in that disaster were wrong. But to this day, the Hindenburg "explosion" is used in books and courses to show how "dangerous" hydrogen is. Just goes to show that just because something has been "known" a for a long time, doesn't mean it's correct.
While we were talking about this (dad and I), he also told me about some experiments he'd seen and/or done many years ago with hydrogen. For example, if you have a tank filled with hydrogen and poke a hole in the side, and light the stream of hydrogen that's coming out with a match, guess what happens? No, it doesn't explode. If it's dark, you'll see a blue flame right at the edge of the hole. You'll see it until there isn't any gas left in the bottle. The pressure of the escaping gas is always just enough to keep it from burning back into the bottle. But there's also another reason it doesn't burn back into the bottle and blow up. Say you stick that match into the hole, guess what happens? The hydrogen will put it out. Poof. Not enough oxygen. See, hydrogen is only flammable in the presence of oxygen. And it's only explosive in tightly confined spaces. So inside you're battery's fuel cell, you'd first have to mix it with a certain percentage of oxygen, while it's still sealed, and then somehow introduce a spark, inside the case, aslo while it's still sealed. Good luck.
Anyway, I just wanted to spread some updated information on the Hindenburg, and I've always thought that whole pure-hydrogen-puts-out-a-match thing really interesting.
So find yourself a shop that rebuilds battery packs. Everybattery.com has franchise stores in several big (and not so big) cities, and those franchises will rebuild damn near any battery pack you bring in.
Also, go to a library and look in a QST magazine - there will be scadloads of places that will rebuild battery packs for you.
The only question is, "Is it worth it to have this pack rebuilt, or should I just buy a new whatever?"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Here's a bit more info on this: Flywheel Basics
A 12 inch diameter flywheel weighing only 23 lb will store 3 kilowatt hours of energy at 100,000 rpm. This is the kind of flywheel UPS that is being installed as mechanical batteries for UPS systems. Typically they use concrete containment vessels (an uncontrolled release of 3 kwh in a few hundred milliseconds is catastrophic) but a lighter weight containment vessel is feasible. It's just hard to beat digging a hole and burying it for low cost safety.
However you've missed a few points:
a) quite a lot of the fuel cells plan to use alcohol, that's about as dangerous as a bottle of whisky.
b) hydrogen is only an issue in strong concentrations below a certain concentration it doesn't combust- ventilation is important, but then it's important anyway with laptops
c) both Hindenburg and Challenger, the H2 wasn't the issue. In both cases they were already very screwed before the hydrogen even caught. Those solid rocket boosters were/are disasters waiting to happen. The SSMEs can be shut down. SSRBs cannot.
d) hydrogen isn't much more dangerous than natural gas
e) there's a difference between detonation and conflagration. The LH2/LOX mixture wasn't a detonation- it was only a conflagration.
f) there's far, far, far more energy in your car fuel tank than in a laptop... think about it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Kinda. You can take a block of TNT and set it on fire. It won't explode. IANAC (chemist) but I believe the difference is that fire requires fuel, oxygen, and heat to ignite while a high explosive required fuel and a good shockwave to detonate. This is why dynamite requires a blasting cap - the blasting cap explodes, creating a sufficient shockwave to detonate the dynamite. Black powder, on the other hand, burns rather than detonates.
I'm sure google is your friend at this point...