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Toshiba To Show Laptop Fuel Cells at CeBit
war3rd writes "According to The Register, Toshiba has finally been able to build a fuel cell for laptops that they will unveil at CeBit next week. The fuel cells are expected to last approximately 5 hours and are compatible with existing lithium-ion batteries. Form factor remains the only issue. The trick is that they use the water by-product from the cell to dilute the methanol source as it enters the reformer, and are therefore able to store higher concentrations of methanol in the cell. My only concern is how quickly can they get this to market?"
Is the best site for information about Fuel Cells
Even with a good catalyst like a fuel cell has, the reaction that takes place has a temperature of several hundred degrees Centigrade.
Sounds good for a little hot action on your laptop!
The answer is that there is nothing in it for them. Manufacturing for OEMs means they have more control over the market and can get more cash per unit. The hard drives, optical drives, memory, CardBus, and mini-PCI all all standardized ways of manufacturers getting cash off the commodity laptop market. Meanwhile, the motherboards, case, power supply, battery, and display manufacturers make a killing by charging so much. Same reason Apple doesn't want clones, letting the market get too open and the prices start running down and eliminating profit margins very quickly. That is why PC laptops are almost as pricy as Apple laptops, and manufacturers recognize a good thing when they see it.
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Here is the methanol safety card. I don't see these on airplanes anytime soon. Anyway, remember those old photocopies from the 70's/early 80's that made pages with blue text? They always smelled a bit and came out a little wet. Yup, methonal was the fluid used in them....
-Sean
You "recharge" by popping in a new cartridge of methanol, which should be cheap ($3-5 initial starting price, probably down to $0.30 eventually. You don't actually have to plug the laptop in for a few hours to recharge it either, so on that long airline flight you can run the laptop indefinitely with enough little cartridges. I saw a pic of a prototype cartridge once somewhere, it looked about the size of a AA battery.
Methanol on an airplane is hardly anything to worry about. It's no more dangerous than ethanol, which of course the airline will happily let you drink as much of as you want as long as you keep paying. It burns, but so does ethanol and paper.
Explosion? Nah. It would be a very difficult task to get so much methanol vapor that an explosion would be much more than alarming pop--the same pop you could get by inflating a barf bag with your breath, twisting off the opening, and POPping it with your fist.
1) you misread this - it's methanol, not menthol.
2) methanol is a poison. Low levels of methanol will permanently blind you. At higher levels, you'd be dead. "Denatured" alcohol is ethanol ("normal" drinkable, get drunk on alcohol) with very low levels of methanol. It's used in industrial processes. There's not enough methanol to screw up most reactions that require ethanol, but enough methanol to make it poisonous to drink so people wont use it as a way of avoiding government taxation.
Given the battery life of an iBook, adding a fuel cell to an iBook probably means you could extract 8 or 9 hours.
Don't tell me that wouldn't be convenient, with a recharge being as simple as swapping methanol cartridges.
While ~10 hours is cooler than 5, I don't think it is that much better [yes, technically it is *double*]. For it to make sense, it would need to last 20h at minumum to convince the majority of manufacturers and users to make the switch. It would also be nice to not have to throw away a spent cart.
It's a value proposition. Can companies make more money by switching to the fuel cell technology? My guess is that it isn't at this time. Maybe in a few years when everything gets smaller/faster, but not now.
I still think fuel cells in cars is a better idea than laptops.... of course now we're talking about a completely different fuel.
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