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Fuel Cells Promised For Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in today's New York Times, fuel cells for portable consumer electronic devices will start appearing next year. First for laptops, and later for smaller devices like cellphones. Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device." The article mentions the Toshiba cells demonstrated at CeBit, and -- no surprise -- Japan is likely to be the first market for these tiny fuel cells.
"Among the interesting benefits of fuel cells over batteries is the ability to swap cells without having to power down the device."
This isn't a specific benefit of fuel cells. Anyone can have a diode-switched dual supply with the backup powered off a much smaller lower-capacity device like a small battery.
The water you evaporate. Heck, evaporative cooling would help everything else in the system, and you aren't talking about very much water.
As for the imurities/junk, just recirculate it back into the "fuel tank", and about once every few months, you dump the fuel tank out to clean it.
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AMERICANS may have to wait 20 years, if not longer, for cars powered by fuel cells to become a familiar sight. But much smaller forms of fuel cell technology may well power electronic devices like laptop computers, video cameras and cellphones by the end of this decade.
Prototypes of long-lasting fuel cells that can replace batteries are being tested in laboratories in the United States and overseas. "Every big electronics company in the world is working on fuel cells in one way or another," said Jerry Hallmark, manager of Motorola's Energy Technology Lab in Phoenix. Some, like Intel, are going a step further and investing millions of dollars in start-up companies like PolyFuel and Neah Power Systems to accelerate development.
"There are some applications that are getting very close to commercialization," said Mike Lynn, head of a unit at the 3M Company that makes fuel cell components.
Mr. Lynn declined to be more specific, but many analysts expect fuel cells for consumer electronic devices to begin appearing next year in Japan. The betting is that the first to reach the market will be Toshiba, which is demonstrating a prototype of a methanol-powered cell this week at a trade show in Hanover, Germany. Toshiba says the cell could be sold next year with laptops.
Some 200 million to 500 million of the small cells, sometimes called microcells, might be sold annually by 2011, according to Allied Business Intelligence, a market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y., that tracks new technology. Annual revenue to the fuel cell companies could be as much as $5 billion, said Atakan Ozbek, Allied's director of energy research.
But Mr. Ozbek and others said that despite the momentum of research and development, widespread microcell commercialization is not yet a sure thing.
"People underestimate the complexity of the system, and start-up companies have been cavalier about the availability of all the components they will need," said Dr. Brian M. Barnett, director of the electromechanical systems practice at Tiax, a technology consulting and development company based in Cambridge, Mass.
Like the fuel cells for cars promoted by President Bush and the even larger units being developed to provide electric power to factories and homes, most microcells generate electricity by chemically stripping hydrogen of its electrons. The electrons form a current running outside the cell while the positively charged ions left behind move through the cell. The ions and the electrons are recombined in a reaction with oxygen to form water, the only byproduct if pure hydrogen is used.
The basic concept for fuel cells was discovered in 1839, but researchers differ on the most practical way to design them to generate the most energy in the least space.
Fuel cells run most efficiently on pure hydrogen, but storing hydrogen compactly and safely is a huge hurdle. Many designers of large and small fuel cell systems are trying to get hydrogen from solid compounds that contain hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels like methanol and ethanol, even though those fuels add other elements like carbon dioxide to the waste stream.
MICROCELLS have several economic advantages over their bigger cousins in the race to commercialization. Energy experts expect to cut the smaller cells' production costs to be competitive with those of batteries long before larger cells can be manufactured at anything close to the cost of internal combustion engines.
It should also be easier and less expensive to persuade retailers to sell fuel cells the size of battery packs than to transform the huge national infrastructure of gasoline stations.
But the biggest reason the smaller cells are expected to become popular sooner is their appeal as a convenience -- something that consumers have shown a willingness to pay for -- and not as an answer to energy and environmental problems.
Fuel cells that last far longer than do rechargeable batteries would free laptop computer users and television camera crews, for example, from the need to lug he
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
The same topic was covered by the BBC a few day's ago. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2847679.stm Some how I just have this feeling that this may not quite be all it's cracked up to be ;).
Since years (at least with Apple Notebooks) you can change the battery without powering down the device.
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
First of all, from what I've heard, they *won't* last 30 times longer - more like twice as long max. Second, you mention "if they're going to replace As Cs and Ds..." but that's not the idea. On a fuel cell powered laptop, you wouldn't replace the "fuel cell," but rather, you'd refill the fuel tank, or replace a fuel cartridge. The cell itself (or stack of cells) is what processes the fuel - you don't replace it.
"A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu
kind of... Coleman has their fuel cell generators, though 'refills' are what might be termed expensive. I believe the above is actually a Coleman branded unit from Ballard Power, Vancouver B.C.
The maximum efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is, indeed, 100%. Obviously, this is impractical, because such an efficiency requires either an infinite difference between the temperature of the source and the sink or for the temperature of the sink to be absolute zero.
The equation for the efficiency of a carnot-cycle engine is 1 - (TL/TH), where TL is the temperature of the cold sink and TH is the temperature of the hot source, both measured in an absolute temperature scale. Because practical considerations require that the sink be large and readily available, TL is seldom lower than 273K (the freezing temperature of water) and is often closer to 300K, which is a better approximation of room temperature. If your source is at approximately 500K, then the engine has an efficiency of 40%.
However, electrical storage media are considerably more efficient at releasing electrical or chemical energy than engines are at producing mechanical energy. Thus, batteries have enormous efficiencies. Fuel cells are still far behind batteries, in terms of efficiency.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I wonder what the FAA will say about taking these things on airplanes.
FAA have already approved at least one make, IIRC. Methanol is no more explosive than the alcohol they push up and down the plane all the time.
Phillip.