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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?"
Is this thing not rechargable? What does:
"...are worth the expense of purchasing a new fuel cartridge every time the power runs out..."
mean?
How is this viable?
The article didn't seem to mention the cost of these new fuel cell batteries along with their refueling cartridges. I don't see anyone switching to new fuel cell batteries anytime soon unless the cost of the fuel cell and lots of refueling cartridges is approximately the same as a regular li-ion battery. Of course, the nice thing about this technology is that you would never actually need to plug anything in because the battery can't be recharged, just change the cartridge. Also raises the question of whether the fuel cartridges will be hot-swappable. Still, fuel cell batteries sound kewl. :)
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
What do people want powering their laptops and mp3 players - a well proven electronic device with safe failure modes...
Try telling that to the user of this laptop. No it's not common, but laptop batteries DO sometimes fail spectacularly & dangerously.
For long-term mobile computing, I'd like to be able to just carry around a 1C packet of methanol to refill my computer at will.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
As long as they don't put out 2.5x the heat
this guy would certainly agree.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Consider the typical office corridor worker, travelling to-and-fro with their tablet PC - do they really want to have to buy or refill a cartridge every day? Would it be practical to have multiple full cartridges on hand and refill them in bulk?
I can see enjoying the option of one of these long life power units if I'm on a flight or in some environment where I need that much portable power without the opportunity to recharge, but it seems doubtful that fuel cells are going to make a major impact on portable electronics until the infrastructure solution is solved. Even still, the infrastructure exists for non-rechargable batteries, yet many people prefer devices that have modern rechargables - it just makes more sense for most situations.
I believe fuel cells are an excellent technology, and a worthy replacement to traditional non-rechargeable batteries, but I find it unlikeley that they will supplant the current methods of use-and-recharge laptop, pda, and cellular batteries - it's just too convenient.
If you want to be very technical about it, we nearly have that. Most of the world is flooded with high-power radio signals. By "radio", I mean AM, FM, television, cell phone, GPS, and everything else.
Tesla proved, repeatedly, that those signals could be caught in an antenna and turned into basic AC power. However, transmitting AC power through the air would mean that the power companies could not control how much electricity you used. So, there was a lot of propoganda, using Thomas Edison as a mouthpiece, to convince the world at large that transmitting radio waves would destroy the world - even calling transmitted AC waves "the devil's science".
Now, we've built thousands of transmission towers. Why not tap into some of that power? Sure, you can't run a laptop on the power off one 900MHz antenna, but what if you had, say 500 of them in a little bundle? 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.
Before you get freaky ideas of humping around 500 antennas on your back, take note that an effective 900MHz antenna can be as little as half and inch long. If you arrange them like spokes on a wheel, you would have a 1-inch wide disk. Now, the trick is to fit the electronics to convert the AC signal into the same small package.
I admit, this isn't the ultimate fuel source you requested, but it is a plentiful and untapped one.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
You do realize, don't you, why Bush and Co are focusing on hydrogen as the supposed future? It's so far off in terms of actually replacing much of anything that focusing on it to the detriment of other, more immediately applicable, technologies (hybridization) ensures oil's continued dominance for the foreseeable future.
This all sort of reminds me of the company that was putting out a huge new version of their product, that was taking an incredibly long time. And all their sales people were saying... don't buy yet.. wait... basically hyping the new product. And then when the new product came out they immediately started hyping the next product. No one bought the first product as a result, the company went out of business, and the second version never appeared.
There is a progression of technologies here, and praying for a leapfrog to the next decade's technology and ignoring more immediate technologies only benefits the oil companies, and further delays actual energy independence.
That's a valid point. With a dead rechargeable battery you can go anywhere, just plug it in and recharge. If there is no mains power, no problem, use the 12V outlet from a car or bring a 50W solar panel or even a wind turbine or what have you.
When, on the other hand, your hydrogen cartridge (or methanol or hydrogen-peroxide or whatever) runs out you just have to get a new one, there's no way around that. In my opinion the runtime of one cartridge has to be many times (not just 2.5x) that of a battery to make it worth it. And for people working in remote locations it might not be worth it at all.
We'll see what happens, because as another poster also pointed out, these things have been around the corner for a few years now. It might be a while yet.
As opposed to all the work done in the Clinton administration that went so far in showing how easy, cheap, and fast it would be to switch over to an alternate fuel economy and show those evil oil companies a thing or two, right? Yeah, too bad that when Bush entered office, he immediately ordered it all dismantled and burned to protect his buddies.
Why dont we see lower power laptops?
using current tech for low power consumption they could make a laptop that has say a 500-600mhz processor and a trans-reflective TFT display like that on PDA's as well as using a hard drive/ram/flash combo to give me 3-4 days run time.
add to it by covering the lid in flexible solar panels and you would have a laptop that is useable by most people that will trickle charge from the lighting in the office or sunlight coming in the windows/ car windows/etc....
not everyone needs a 2.8ghz Centrino with a super 3d video card + 10,000rpm laptop hard drive to do their daily tasks.
granted this would mean that OS makers (Microsoft you hear me?) actually start making the OS smaller and faster... but there are times that I wish I could have a sub/sub notebook taking advantage of today's tech making weigh almost nothing with gobs of battery life.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ok, maybe it's me, but it seems that no one has thought about the practical implicaitons of how this works.
1) Take the idea of carrying your LiIon battery, and compact charger, throwing it away, and basically replacing it with the equivalent number of AA batteries needed to make a business trip.
1a) Now think about how much your back is going to hurt after dealing with that much weight in an airport.
2) OK, now take that thought, replace those AA batteries with something that's full of liquid, flammable liquid at that, and carry enough of those to power your laptop for a week long business trip.
3) Disposal of the spent cartridges. And the fact that this thing spits out steam (euphemistically called water vapor in the article) right near delicate electronic components. Does it have an exhaust pipe to make sure that you don't get condensation all over your expensive computer bits?
4) How does this really help? It might be cool to do for disposable batteries. I'd love to be able to get longer life in my flashlight with a battery like this, but not in my laptop with those kind of limitations.
Reeses
- other companies make a compatable form-factor
- original company starts changing the form factor on a regular basis
- other companies make refill kits
- original company adds software so the cartridge thinks its empty
- someone makes a 'tool' to convince the cartridge otherwise
- original company sues person under the DCMA
Okay, that's not exactly the timeline with the previous ones, but I'd expect something similiarYou'll go to the store, and have to buy company X's model to it your machine, but the store will be all out, because company X is having a supply problem, and no one else has a comporable model. [case in point -- I got the third to the last pack of AA batteries at the CVS near my house last week....out of 12 or so hooks of Duracell, Energizer, generics, in 4/8/12 packs, they had 2 packs of generics left after I left... I have no idea why they were that low (they could've had more in back, I didn't ask).
If it's some proprietary format, I'm just not optimistic about finding a new battery when mine goes dead.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"Small child dies in tragedy involving laptop".
I've not seen any discussion of this aspect of direct methanol fuel cells on the web, but it's an important one.
(shrug) Methanol is no more toxic than many houshold cleaners, and when sealed in a fuel cell it's probably a bit harder to get at. When's the last time someone let a child chew on their laptop battery? Even if we end up with bottles of methanol lying around, it'll certainly be no worse than having bottles of ammonia and bleach.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Gasoline only ignites in a pretty narrow range of fuel/air mixtures. Didn't the engineers come to your school and demonstrate this with the gasoline soaked dollar? Hydrogen is more ignitable but also leaks easier. Hard to say which is more dangerous. I think most battery replacement fuel cells run on methane (which might be cracked for the hydrogen). Hopefully you can buy something similar to the butane? refils that you use for lighters.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Go to a hardware store. Find a gallon. It's about $5 bucks.
A better source would ethanol. Higher energy concetration. Easier to produce, and also comercially available (at hardware stores it's called denatured alcohol, it's ethanol with enough methanol to make it posionous.) Wouldn't want people to get drunk without paying taxes--so lets blind 'em!
As methanol is made of Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms, a common mean to get some is from... Petroleum!
For hydrogen, easy, just take some water, some electricity, and separate Hydrogen from Oxygen. But, where do we get electricity? Sometimes from petroleum, often from nuclear plants...
So before everything else we should better develop cleaner ways for producing our electricity.
Ugh... desknotes are bad enough!
Use a real mobile chip for a moble computer. A 2GHz Dothan is very competitive with a standard P4. With a fuel cell notebook, I want ten hours of battery life, not two and a half.
No, because the typical source of hydrogen is electrolyzed water. Hence you are simply recreating the water where the hydrogen came from in the first place. However, since it takes energy to split water, and that energy presumably came from fossil fuels, you are definitely causing an environmental impact.
Also, burning hydrocarbons releases water as well as CO2. If the excess water had a large environmental impact, we would have noticed it by now. The CO2 is much more important in terms of environmental impact.
The NYTimes (reg. req'd) has a report about ongoing research on glucose-based fuel cells. Maybe instead using batteries, we'll soon just plug our laptops into our arms.
A single aspirin-sized pellet of U-235 could power your laptop for 20,000 years.
I realize you're joking, but lest some of the Slashbots around here take this as insightful commentary:
1) Unlike plutonium, U-235 is not radioactive enough to be used as a heat source for a thermoelectric generator.
2) A small pellet of U-235 cannot generate electricity via nuclear processes. You need a critical mass in order to sustain fission, which is a minimum of around 15 kg in the case of U-235.
3) Nuclear reactors are really just steam-driven turbines which use nuclear fission as the heat source. You could generate power just as easily by lighting a big fire and using it to boil water (and in fact that's exactly what fossil fuel plants do). Obviously, this isn't something that can be scaled down to portable sizes.
4) You don't need anything approaching 20 pounds of lead to shield you from uranium's radioactivity. You wouldn't want to swallow it, but you could hold a bare pellet of U-235 in your hand perfectly safely, and a paper-thin layer of lead would completely block its radioactivity. The massive shielding around nuclear powerplants is primarily there to protect us from the neutrons generated during fission, which are very difficult to stop.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Yes, reversible fuel cells have not been left without attention, but there are some problems, both electrochemical and mechanical. First, the catalyst used for the cell can't be carbon supported platinum, which is the best for hydrogen fuel cells, since electrolysis happens in a potential region(*) where carbon is oxidized. Therefore, a non-carbon supported catalyst or a non-supported catalyst is needed and the search is still on.
Second, storing the hydrogen might be a problem. Pressurized container are bulky and require additional components, e.g. compressors, and chemical storage systems, for example metal hydride containers are heavy and expensive.
For most uses, there is no need to store oxygen. There's enough oxygen in air, and air is readily available in most use environments.
* Yes, you can split water at a potential, which is under the oxidation potential of carbon, but reaction kinetics at that potential are not favorable, i.e. too slow. Therefore, practical electrolysis requires a higher potential.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht
If we're talking about point-of-use emissions, then yes, hydrogen is the way to go. The issue is, how do we get the hydrogen. With our current technology, the most likely way of getting hydrogen will be refining fossil fuels, so it does indeed benefit the oil industry. The combination of hybrid/energy recapture systems and more efficient energy conservation measures (like LED lights for instance) with hydrogen may serve to improve matters, but that's not where GM, Ford et al are heading. Refined methanol/ethanol/etc. I'm guessing will be far more expensive per joule of energy than gasoline currently is, so conservation remains a concern. Re: power usage/demands, you have a point - nothing else is viable right now. Clearly that's why the US government should spend 100 times as much subsidizing oil production as it does to stimulate research of alternative energy sources such as photoelectric, wind, etc.
They are not "oil" companies. They are energy companies, and they will sell anything that makes them money.
Do you think Exxon, Chevron, et al are fools? Regardless of how you view their environmental morals, they are in it for the money. They know better than you how much oil is or isn't in the ground. Not only will they gladly invest capitol in the energy source with the highest profit margin, they have a history of investing now for long-term payouts. If wind, solar, or hydro was seen by their hundreds and hundreds of economists and scientists as economically advantageous, they'd be all over it.