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Fuel Cells for Laptop Computers
ArbiterOne writes "An article in PC World states that the company MTI Micro Fuel Cells plans to demonstrate a new technology this week that could pave the way for better power technology for laptop and palmtop computers. The article claims that this new technology could provide a battery life 2.5 times greater than that of a lithium-ion battery. Could this be the solution to the problem of short battery life in high-end notebooks?"
hydrogen peroxide is extremely dangerous and unstable in its pure form. Even the stuff Armadillo Aerospace is using is only 97% pure. Every bottle of hydrogen peroxide I've found in a drug store was 3%. Could a fuel cell operate on mostly water?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
see New Sci home page, article is:
though of course you'll need to have paid money to read it...
It does cover some useful stuff including the fact that any alternative to a bettery that produces even relatively small quantities of unpleasant exhaust won't be any fun in a small space - like an aeroplane cabin...
"we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
> Try telling that to the user of this laptop.
You do of course realise it's been well established around the mac web that it's a hoax. The owner of the site admitted to faking it in photoshop.
The last Mac to catch fire was a 5300 in a lab setting in the 1990s, and even then only with a battery that didn't stay in production.
I think the idea isn't that it will complete replace batteries immedietely, but rather supplement them for persons needing an extended time with out a charge. When I go on trips I usually need to bring along a power converter to change 12 volt car power to my laptop 110 volt charger. I would gladly have spent more on my laptop to not have the hassle of all those wires, the same way I spent a little more to get wireless instead of plugging in.
What makes you think 500 antennas in a little bundle would be measurably better than one?
Even then, if you couldn't run the laptop off it, you could use the little power you did get to trickle charge the battery - making it last a lot longer.
You have a very interesting definition of "a lot".
take note that an effective 900MHz antenna can be as little as half and inch long.
A half-wave dipole for 900mhz is about 6.5" long. You'll seriously decrease effectiveness by using something smaller.
Now, the trick is to fit the electronics to convert the AC signal into the same small package.
They make pretty small diodes these days... Why don't you make your own crystal radio and see for yourself how much power you can capture from radio? Hint: most RF field strength meters (which need batteries) report in microvolts per meter.
Actually, fuel cells run on hydrogen, which is the most plentiful gas in the universe. Which makes it more available than fossil fuels...
I saved a copy because it looked like the server was going down http://students.depaul.edu/~bengert/fule/0,aid,116 591,00.asp.htm
Almost all objects on the planet have large amounts of hydrogen in them. Hydrogen is not a fossil fuel, and being the most abundent material in the universe, we won't be running out of it any time soon.
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Heck, the most pure commercially available concetration of H2O2 (with a liscense to have it) is something like 33%
It's kept in a brown plastic container, cause it dosen't like sunlight, and it'll eat pretty much anything (flesh, table top, metal, etc.)
I can't imagine what 97% would be like.
Just run it backwards. It's basically electrolysis/hydrolysis, after all.
our correct in your statement but your neglecting that most industrial hydrogen is made from and with fossil fuels. Granted you need to get the demand there then you can work on that but it's not realy a clean solution today it's just moving the polution to the factory/plant away from the car.
No sir I dont like it.
From: http://www.c-f-c.com/gaslink/pure/methanol.htm
Methanol: A colorless, flammable liquid with an odor repulsive pungent. Shipped and stored in dissolved acetone. Can decompose spontaneously if pressure exceeds 15 PSIG.
Hazards: A toxic substance. Irriatates eyes and causes dizziness, nausea and is a possible carcinogen.
Yeah, I'm going to carry a bottle of that onto a post-9/11 jetliner.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Take a typical FM broadcast tower. Say, DC101 in the DC-metro area. 22.5 kWatts. That power is spread out over the entire surface area of the region. Some tens of hundreds of square miles. And the inverse-square law is a bitch. Your antenna will receive the tiniest fraction of a watt. It's a good thing your radio tuner or cellphone has a filter and amplifier to do something with it.
You definitely can't get usable juice from that.
No, son, if you were being irridated with narrow band EM waves that were incident in such a fashion to be able to power a laptop (say, 50 watts), without a parabolic antenna, you'd be blind, or dead. This is how microwave ovens work (in the 802.11b range, no less)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You could run a Stirling engine on the exhaust output and start generating electricity, or power some form of locomotion.
500 to 700 degrees is ridiculous. That's more heat output than when running a nitro-powered radio control engine...
When the waste heat is that high, something is seriously wrong. They need to slow the reaction down, keep that temp down, otherwise, you'll never get approval to bring it anywhere.
You'd be better off building a small portable steam engine.
-- No sig for you!
So similarly, even if a hotel would foolishly allow you to crack tap water to produce hydrogen and oxygen in your hotel room in the quantities needed without causing a fire or explosion, how would you propose to carry around these gases ? You would need a good, portable compressor to fill up a tank.
I think if you thought about it a bit, you'd realize that supplying and storing alcohols is much more simple and practical than hydrogen, for the same reasons that this whole "hydrogen economy" notion has so many problems of practicality that it will probably never happen and that biofuels (alcohols, biodiesel, etc) are much more likely.
Li-ion cells don't have a memory effect, but the memory effect was a myth in the first place. Like all cells they degrade over time depending on numerous factors.
In addition to the difficulties already pointed out, electrolysis of water is a very inefficient process. The electricity it takes to generate a certain amount of hydrogen via electrolysis vastly exceeds the amount you get back by turning that hydrogen into water.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Actually, that's not waste heat at all. The reaction inside the fuel cell isn't combustion - it's an electrochemical process... The reaction 'chamber' has to be heated up for the electrodes to start catalyzing the 'fuel'. There's a lot of research being done so that the reaction can occur at room temperature, but right now it's a limitation of the electrodes, not the reaction.