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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
He should definitely put that into the wikipedia.
I wish that worked on girlfriends...
This would be great for taking soups along with you. Especially for lunchs or breakfasts, or on hiking trips.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Hot coffee hack? Wait till the ESRB hears about this!
Why did this take so long to figure out? MRE's have been self-heating for a long time and the heater in them gets really hot in less time...
Okay, maybe it is neat that they've been able to make this work, but doesn't it seem just a bit wasteful to anyone but me? Western society at it's best, I guess.
robert
After the article earlier about the GTA hack, /.ers will all be much more interested in hot coffee than before.
The army has been using this technology in its rations for a loooong time now.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
25 Million and 10 years? That's like employing 15 scientists and engineers at a good wage (plus room for admin overhead), all working 40 hour weeks for an entire decade.
For this low-tech device? Something doesn't add up.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I bet you'll start seeing obnoxious pple going through all of a store's stock pushing the heat button on each of the cans so that the end customer gets cold coffee :p
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it. A shot of espresso made with freshly roasted / ground beans and on a well maintained machine by a well trained barrista is the apex of coffee perfection and cannot be improved upon.
Wow, spoken like a true innovator. You must work for Microsoft.
That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.
[/rant]
t ml
The hack is cool.
But this crappy coffee can is worthy of a patent? A calcium oxide/water reaction learned in any highschool advanced chemistry class?
Reading the patent below, I must wonder if those who give out patents get lost in the gobbely-gook of the descriptions not to see that it seems to fail the basic requirements of a patent:
http://www.patentsearchexpress.com/requirements.h
Especially in the view of non-obviousness in view of prior art. Self-heating pads using assorted chemicals have been around for a long time. How long was it before someone applied it to not to hands but to food/drinks which we've been warming up since like forever. This is question of application, not innovation.
I also have to question the $24 million to develop this thing. Reminds me when GE (or maybe whirlpool???) came out with front-loading washers like 10 years or so ago and announced it took $100M to develop and spouting all the benefits of the system (lower water consumption, etcetera). When the europeans have been using front-loaders since at least the '50s, you gotta wonder who's been embezzling all that cash.
[/rant]
(From The article}
United States Patent 5,461,867
Scudder , et al. October 31, 1995
Container with integral module for heating or cooling the contents
Abstract
An outer container for holding a material, such as a food, beverage or medicine with a sealed thermic module inside the container. The thermic module contains chemical reactants that mix upon actuation of the container by a user. Mixing of the reactants produces an exothermic or endothermic chemical reaction, depending upon the reactants selected. The contents of the outer container surround a portion of the outside surface of the thermic module, thereby facilitating conduction of heat. The thermic module has a hollow module body that is closed at one end and a module cap that seals the other end of the module body. The module body contains the solid reactant, and the module cap contains the liquid reactant. The module cap has a tubular section with a flexible member closing one end and a breakable barrier closing the other end. With the exception of the barrier, the cap is of unitary construction. The cap has one or more integrally formed prongs extending from the inner surface of the disc toward the barrier. The prongs move in an axial direction toward the barrier and may also spread apart radially when the outer surface of the flexible member or an actuator connected to it is depressed by the user's finger. The dual motion of the prongs in both axial and radial directions promotes complete puncturing of the barrier and thus fast mixing of the reactants.
Link.
Finally I can get a hot cup of coffee anywhere I go, because, you know, it's not like there's a place to buy coffee on every corner.
Oh wait, Starbucks...
...and a million other convenience stores, restaurants, cafes and coffeeshops.
Off topic, but...
The energy in a matter-antimatter (proton anti-proton) reaction goes toward the production of various particles that are of sufficiently high energy to pass right through your coffee: muons, gamma rays. Neutrinos too, which don't interact.
Under the unrealistic assumption that all the energy produced goes toward heating the coffee:
2ng matter + 2ng antimatter = 4e-9 g
E = m*c^2
= 4e-9 g * (3e8 m/s)^2
= 3.6e8 g*m^2/s^2
A joule is kg*m^2/s^2, so we're looking at 3.6e5 J of energy. Approximating coffee with water, water has a heat capacity of 4186 J/(kg*K), and assuming we have 100 cm^3 of it:
3.6e5 J / 4186 J/(kg*K) / 0.1 kg = 8600 K
I hope you like your coffee vaporized.
I realize this is offtopic and will risk getting modded down, but why are you duping my post word for word an hour later? Is this karma theft instead of karma whoring? It actually seems to work because you got modded up and I got modded down "redundant."
I assume that you just wait for a higher rated post to scroll off the first page and then repost at the top. I am curious on why you'd even bother though. Are you just trying to game the mods and see if they're paying attention? It seems like an odd hobby.
Be warned that the previos poster's opinion is wrong and he's not entitled to it. The PDF isn't related and the other blogger isn't better.
We don't have those fancy things in Canada as far as I know but I wouldn't buy em if we did. First of all it looks like you don't get very much coffee and second it looks expensive and third you're allways in driving distance of a Tim Hortons anyways.
How often are you so far from a power source that you can't spend $10 and get a small coffee cup sized hotplate?
Silly silly silly
On the other hand if you could somehow drain the coffee and put a heat activated smoke bomb or something in there than they'd sell
Finally, I do buy food that I throw out all the time. I would be a big fat pig if I ate every french fry I ever bought. Is it wasteful? I dunno, everyone who grew the potatoes, transported them, turned them into french fries, cooked them and sold them to me thought they were making a reasonable profit on them. I thought it was a good value for my money - in fact I got TOO MANY with my "#4 lunch special". I ate what I wanted and tossed the rest. Then the garbage man gets paid to haul it away. Whee!
At which time it goes into a landfill and quite rapidly decomposes, providing fuel for the non-immediately-biodegradable substances to start decomposing.
The "waste" is that this coffee cup goes into the same landfill, takes up about as much space as two super-size french fry orders, and yet last, oh, let's just estimate that it lasts about ten million times as long in said landfill.
The PROBLEM here is that not all costs are passed on to the consumer OR to the provider. The cost of waste disposal is horrifically uncapitalized in the US, primarily because, aside from materials deemed "hazardous waste", there is no good way to regulate it. If waste management were properly capitalized, styrofoam cups would run for hundreds of dollars. But, it's not. You pay as much to throw out the styrofoam cup that rents landfill space on the order of eons as you do to throw out the serving of lasagna you left too long in the fridge, which will be gone from the landfill (as a discrete body of substance) in a matter of weeks.
No matter how "free market driven" an economy is, it needs to understand where free markets fail. They OFTEN fail when public goods and services are needed to handle their byproducts, and this is a perfect example of that.
In other words: yes, this is a horrendous waste of resources, and even though I do firmly believe in free market forces, I'd love for my government to step in and put a mandatory recycling program (vendor-funded) or heavy use tax on products such as this. Because it's not the producer who pays for this today, nor the consumer, nor the garbage man. It's your children and mine, who have to live in this filth.