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Fuel Cell Laptop announced by Toshiba
Steve writes "Following on from the Fuel Cells approved for airline cabins story a week or so back, it would seem there will soon be a need for that approval:
Toshiba has announced a fuelcell powered laptop for 2004,and possibly a PDA."
That's great, but from what I understand, these things have to be replaced, or at least recharged. How's that gonna be done?
Any idea what these are actually fueled with? Alcohol or something proprietary?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's still only 10 hours. I betcha that the price difference for this baby will be a lot more than if you just stock up on extra batteries. I'll keep my ineffiecent Dell for now.
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
This sounds pretty sweet. I do wonder if the cartridges would be refillable though. Changing them out and replacing them every other day could lead to a large pile of empty cans very quickly, even moreso if the technology catches on. While they are far better then dumping Li-ion batteries into landfills, refillible would still be better yet.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
That's not true. I was searched by a helpful, if not portly, security lady. She politely informed me that I was allowed to have only one lighter, not the two she found in my laptop bag. Helpfully, she allowed me to choose which of my two lighters I'd like to give to her. I chose the older one, as I am not the sentimental type and it was nearly out of butane. I was then allowed to board the aircraft and proceed safely to my destination.
So, you can take a butane lighter on board a plane, but only one at a time. On the other hand, you can easily order several alcoholic drinks like vodka which would combust very nicely from the comfort of your spacious seat.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
The company I work for produces Methanol. In one of the boardrooms is a little acryllic car shaped object and inside is a tiny methanol powered fuel cell and a little supply of methanol. You flip the switch and a little electric motor starts turning a little wheel.
Sure, it's kind of stupid, but it's neat to be able to play with a real fuel cell.
While I'm not a fan of toshiba laptops, I am glad to see a major manufacturer pushing this technology.
Batteries quite frankly suck and I travel alot. Expect at least 1 customer (me) to buy one of those fuel cell laptops.
One thing I do wonder though, is environmentally how will a disposed of fuel cell treat the environment as opposed to a disposed of battery?
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
After September 11th, wouldn't airlines be quite wary of anything that could, if properly rigged by master terrorists, blow a hole in the fuselage large enough to down the plane?
They're jumpy enough that my friend, when he joked that he had "Yeah, and a big brick of C4" in his bag to a National Guard soldier, they detained him for 6 hours and -- I exaggerate not -- gave him a full cavity search, tore open his shoes, and destroyed his laptop looking for bombs.
Though it may be an advance, it may be banned from airplanes by paranoid maniacs like John Ashcroft.
This article states that we can only involves replacing the liquid fuel without shutting down the computer. But how do you get to the battery without shutting down the computer?
I'd settle for a small doohickey I can use in place of a wall wart. With adjustable output voltage and multiple plugs, something like this and this.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I highly doubt that Toshiba has strenously tested their fuel cell model for these new machines.
Is every engineer there totally confident and fully knowledgeable about all aspects of fuel cells? If so, then they surely know how to deal with:
- current limits
- bipolar plates
- Efficiency and open circuit voltage
- Efficiency and efficiency Limits
- Efficiency and the fuel cell voltage
Not to mention they should have a firm grasp on:
- The Effect of Pressure and Gas Concentration
- The Nernst equation
- Hydrogen partial pressure
- Fuel and oxidant utilisation
- Fuel Cell Irreversibilities - Causes of Voltage Drop
- Activation Losses
- The Tafel equation
- Reducing the activation overvoltage
- Summary of activation overvoltage
The last thing anyone wants is a fried laptop. Imagine walking away from your new Toshiba fuel cell-powered Pentium 5 laptop only to come back and find the screensaver off because the entire unit is charred like a cod on a plate of Fish 'N Chips!
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
That's nice.
:P
:P)
:P) I'd be willing to go all fuelcell, save a small battery that would let me change carts without rebooting :P
Anyway, this is pretty cool. Although we'll have to see how the fueling method works. Some people mentioned a 'cigarett lighter' type thing you could buy, but we'll have to see how much of a 'revineu source' these companies consider it... It would kind of suck if they cost as much as the ink cartrages for most printers
Even if the price is down to $2-$3 a cart, I'd still rather go with the practicaly free eletrical power from an outlet then disposable carts.
And finaly, eletrical power is so cheap that most people don't mind if you just plug your stuff in. When I bring my laptop just about anywhere, I can feel confident I'll be able to find an outlet to plug it into. I could even get an adapter for my car (actualy, an 9vdc->120vac to plug my 120vac ->12vdc power brick, but hey it works
With these things, you're SOL. Personaly, I think it would be cool to combine the two into a hybrid solution, a 30min/1hr battery that you can charge while using via a plug or via the fuel cell system. That would really give you the best of both worlds.
Of course, when we can get fuel cell's for $0.20 and fill them up anywhere (say, people put natural gas taps in their kitchen or something
(oh, btw. I'm tying this in on a server machine, that dosn't happen to have any spell checking software installed. Now you can all see my horrible spelling in it's full glory!!!)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A while back, (more than a year, I beleive) Motorola announced the creation of an alcohol-based fuel cell system which didn't require a pump to move the air...
This came with the possible promises of 1 month cell phone life, and 15 hour laptop run times.
It would be a great thing to pop a plastic cylinder of alcohol into your laptop, PDA, cell phone, etc. and not worry about finding an outlet.
But nothing ever really came of it. Maybe the platinum mesh proved to expensive to manufacture.
Hopefully, the fuel will come is sealed canisters that are pierced as they are insterted into a device, like ink cartridges and pens, or CO2 and paintball guns.
This would be much safer for the user, and probably easier to deal with from a production, maintenance, and disposal point of view.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Yes! I want to run my laptop for a week on a single charge! If I can buy a $14 lithium-ion battery for my cellphone that'll let me use it for a week, why can't I buy a battery that'll run my laptop for that amount of time?
I wouldn't demand that it be 1/8" thin and weigh next to nothing -- after all, I'm not going to carry my laptop around in my *pocket*. Still, though, shouldn't it be possible to make a battery pack that'd get the job done?
With the popularity of wireless networks, it has become a pain to have to plug in the laptop to the electric outlet while you spent that money to set up a wireless entwork so that you could stay on the net without any wires.
Right! Can anyone speak authoritatively to this and answer the question "What would it take?" If I'm willing to spend $3000+ for a laptop, I'd probably be willing to shell out a reasonable price for a portable power source that'll run my laptop for as long as my phone. What's stopping the battery makers from selling such a product?
Is there a reason that no one is doing the equivalent of wiring up 30 of those cellphone flatpack batteries in parallel and selling *that*? Would that work?
Or is the power drain for an illuminated LCD screen and current-generation CPU & hard drive still so high that they'd have to sell it with a steel frame, rubberized luggage handle and wheels?
TyZone
Battery life could be a lot better today, if people put less *crap* in their laptops. Let's do a rundown:
* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power.
* Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar).
* Do not use an x86 processor. Repeat after me. Intel and AMD both make processors completely unsuited for laptop use.
* Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more.
* Axe the 3d hardware and extra video crap. No one is going to play Quake on their laptop anyway -- lousy form factor, and trackballs, trackpads, and nipples are all awful at Quake control.
* Have "premium" batteries. It costs more to make fancier, longer lasting batteries? Okay, do so and then offer both fancy and less fancy as an option.
May we never see th
So what happens when everybody starts carrying these things onto planes? Will the airlines charge extra for the additional oxygen consumed? How much oxygen does one of these things use compared to a typical person?