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?"

Comments

Re:The nice thing about "normal" batteries...

[Paulrothrock]

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?

also covered in NewScientist

[grey1]

see New Sci home page, article is:

• GIVE IT SOME GAS Ditch those flaky low-tech batteries: the miniature internal combustion engine is gearing up to power everything from laptops to cellphones p.26

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...

I don't think so, and here's why:

[Ayanami Rei]

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)

Re:(Scratches head)

[neurocutie]

Most of the fuel cell prototypes proposed for laptop use and similar run on methanol, not hydrogen. This is probably because it is obviously much easier to deal with a few ounces of fluid fuel rather than a high pressure compressed tank of hydrogen. It would be lunacy to allow an average consumer to deal with a tank of compressed hydrogen that has the potential of venting into open air.

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.