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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.
powering all the damn flying cars, where else?
I've heard about fuel cells powering the 21st Century about as long as I've heard that I should have gotten a flying car for my birthday last year. First things first. Fuel cells have a lot of potential, but why waste all that extra energy on an Intel-powered notebook? Seriously, why don't the leading developers of fuel cells team up with Transmeta to make an invincible laptop that would blow Dell and Compaq-HP out of the water? That would mark one giant leap for the little guys, who greatly deserve a boost in success right about now.
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
There's the rub. Micro fuel cells may not be allowed on airplanes because the hydrogen-based devices use a highly flammable gas, while the methanol-based devices include an inflammable liquid.
No thanks, I'll stick to my shitty laptop with the one battery that lasts about two hours. Better to have a laptop that sucks down the battery than one that EXPLODES IN YOUR LAP.
While everyone is quick to cheer on fuel cells as being über enviromentally friendly, as the process only produces water, etc. etc... people fail to remember that it takes a great deal of power to generate the hydrogen in these cells, and this power has to come from somewhere. Therefore, if we're running around with cars, laptops, etc., running these fuel cells and we are still relying on coal/oil power generation, then we are really no further ahead.
Nuclear is my vote for meeting the needs of the future, but i suppose your millage may vary.
I know this is slightly off topic, but it is something that should be kept in mind when discussing hydrogen fuel cells.
-legolas.
I do own a fuel cell. To be exact, it's a small direct methanol cell, which runs on a 3% methanol and 97% water solution. I'm damn sure that 3% methanol is not too flamable.
My guess is that the number one thing keeping fuel cells off the mainstream market is the cost of production. Specifically, the poles of the cell have to be made of platinum. Last time I checked platinum isn't too cheap.
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tcd004
The safety concerns of alternative fuels are highly overrated. Contrary to popular belief, hydrogen is NOT explosive except in some pretty odd geometries, which you are never going to attain in any type of fuel cell, nor in the environment around it, should the hydrogen leak out. It is indeed flammable, but much less dangerous than, say, gasoline, or lighter fluid. Before someone makes some lame crack about hydrogen-filled zeppelins, it is extremely important to note that it was NOT the hydrogen that exploded/burned in disasters such as the Hindenberg, but rather the magnesium-based paint that was coating the hydrogen envelope. Methanol is a bit more exciting, but still a perfectly safe chemical to use with the proper safegaurds. You would think that your laptop would cease to be a useful computational device long before you subjected it to enough force to crack open a high impact plastic shell intended to contain flammable materials.
New materials are beginning to make fuel cells feasible. They will happen once everything falls into place.
Look at handhelds: the Palm was not the first by a long shot, nor technically the best, but Palm was lucky that when they came to market, all the pieces had fallen into place and they hit the right price point (and, yes, it was luck).
So, are we completely giving up on flywheels? They may not be too mainstream, but they hold the promise of incredibly light devices (at least they can be) with the ability to hold incredible ammounts of energy, and store it with practically no loss, for a very long period.
That would also relieve the long charging times necessecary with batteries (at least they could).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
in that crater over there with the dead scientists...
remember kids, don't play with presurized hydrogen!
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I almost believed your message until I got to the part about the goverment and their amazingly superior computers... anyone who has done consulting for the government knows they actually have an assortment of banged-up relics from the cold war days.
Maybe the superior computers are in the top secret hangar at Area 51.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
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.
There once was a US company who built a hybrid car which used a shoe-box sized turbine engine and a small flywheel. They designed both components from scratch and debugged it to the point where they drove the car across country. I don't even think it broke down once (unlike that fuelcell car that just made it's trip x-country and broke down many times).
r dw are.htmi ne/fall97 /9_25/Benrosen.html
http://www.awl.com/englishpages/tech_talking_ha
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/business/botl
there were more links a couple of years ago but now many are no longer posted. There used to be a good one with illustrations and pictures. Anyway, none of the Big Three would buy into their design so they closed shop. Capstone still makes compact turbine engines though.....
Could be a good time to auction off the car on ebay?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
They were promptly bought out by gillette together with all their patents, then shut down. This was more than a decade ago. I only know this because my grandfather was telling me about it recently, he still has some. To this day I still have to buy razor blades that last for less than a month.
Go figure.
I had the argument about the lightbulb with my physics teacher. I lost. Do some research. Cheap efficient lightbulbs that last for decades aren't hard to produce. The parent poster is right when he says the companies who make lightbulbs aren't interested and destroy anyone who attempts it.
Capitalism in practice does not work like you think. Monopolies and cartels are a dime a dozen in this world, stiffling competition and using power and influence to maintain outdated buisness models.
Liberty.
.. is not that they last only two-four hours with laptop use. The real problem is that they only last two years before they are totally worn out and you can toss them away. Not too long ago, my dad had to get a new cellular phone because he couldn't find batteries to his Nokia 8110 anymore. The phone was perfectly good for his use and the only reason why he had to get a new phone was because the battery would only last 15 minutes. That's how dead it has gotten in three years. Most of the 2+ year old laptops I've seen have the same problem. PDA's, CD and MD players, same thing. They get a lifespan of 2-3 years simply because their batteries will go dead in that time and you won't find replacements because the stores and factories have moved on to new products.
I can walk into any Riders Hobby shop and pick up a fuel cell. They are in the educational kits section. It has both a way to generate your own hydrogen+oxygen from a solar cell and then you can run the fuel cell from the gasses you just created to spin a motor.
Granted HIGH power fuel cells and an abundance of hydrogen and a safe way to transport it are not here... but I can buy fuel cells at a regular store all day long.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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...