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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?"
If you want a fuel cell to be practically usable, you should make it run on 40% Ethanol, 60% water. That way, there is a commonly available fuel (Vodka) which can be easily purchased most everywhere in the US (outside Mormonstan at least).
If you can make the fuel cell deal with more impurities, you could also use Whiskey or Tequila or similar distilled spirits.
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It'd be nice if the component makers would establish an "open laptop" form factor. We've alreadt got mini-ITX. We just need a chassis/monitor and DC power specification.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
My question is, how long will the battery hold up? I don't mean a single charge, I mean how long will the battery be usuable. Also, it states at the end of the article it will take 2-3 years to get to market. It's amazing that the poster of this story can't even read the article
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Squirrel
Is the best site for information about Fuel Cells
Let's see. Now I can have a batter with a moderately longer runtime, but refilling it is much more difficult than simply plugging it in. Who's going to go for that? OK, it's cool. OK, it's environmentally friendly, but is that enough to overcome the convenience factor?
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!
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.
Coding under the influence.
Honest officer I was just fueling my laptop.
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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.
As others have pointed out, 5 hours on a laptop is *nothing* The batteries on my iBook do that just fine. Sure it takes me a couple of hours to fully recharge, but that's what a second battery is for, should I need one. Also, I don't have to refill, nor throw away spent fuel cells. It sounds like manually refueling would be a pain in the arse [for a laptop]. Vehicles using fuel cells sound much more interesting
What would be interesting would be a fuel cell laptop that got maybe 24 hours on a "charge".
This just seems like gadgetry for its own sake
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Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/ According to the above page, ultracapacitors "deliver up to 10 times the power, last up to 10 times as long, operate more reliably in high- and low-temperature conditions, require far less maintenance and reduce environmental issues associated with battery disposal" compared to batteries. I recently read about a hybrid automobile that will be using ultracaps (don't remember who). It seems like these could be implemented in laptops and cell phones.
BTW, before anyone questions "why don't I use a go-ped like engine" - noise is the main reason, laws are another (as in legal grey area).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon