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Sony Develops Buckyball Fuel Cell
Jonny Marx wrote to mention a post over at Digital World Tokyo detailing Sony's latest fuel cell technology, which uses Fullerenes (Buckyballs) to achieve a lot of power in a little space. From the article: "... The technology looks like a significant step in the right direction toward the development of DMFCs powerful enough to supplement or replace lithium batteries for handheld gadgets. Methanol leakage and power output have been the devilish details that have stopped DMFCs becoming widespread, along with regulations that are still being hammered out to allow methanol to be carried aboard passenger aircraft, and a methanol fuel infrastructure, i.e. being able to pick up refills at Japan's ubiquitous konbini (convenience stores) for example."
Wait a second! You tricksters!
That's not fuel! That's a fruit roll up!
[if you don't get it, at least LOAD the article]
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Realistically, I think they'll have to develop some kind of disposable delivery system, maybe something that looks like batteries, that you jam into your gadget and throw away when it's out of fuel (or maybe it could be refillable). Question would be, how much fuel do you need to give you, say, 15 hours of play time? Would it fit in one or two double-A size batteries, or would you need to carry around a jug of the stuff?
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This week we like Sony?
On Wikipedia.
power density of about 100 milliwatt-hours per square centimeter.
Could someone convert this to furlongs per LoC and tell me what other competing techs like today's laptop batteries have?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...but I've decided to cut my nose off to spite my face by boycotting Sony because of Sony BMG's recent DRM-o-rama.
Seriously, this is the Sony I once knew and loved, when it did things like this all the time. Maybe those of us boycotting the entire company because of last month's debacle should adjust things a bit?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
It's too bad that Richard Smalley, co-discoverer of the buckmeisterfullerene, died a few weeks ago. I'm sure he would have loved to finally see some of his research hitting practical consumer markets.
Rice University hasn't been the same without him. He was sort of a big deal around here.
..how long until they create robots powered by alcohol?
The question is how much energy is lost by converting it to this form. If the conversion(s) from sources of energy to user-forms actually pollutes or wastes more transforming along the way then it still needs work or other alternatives should be explored. Practically all the energy (excluding nuclear and gravity) we use originates from the Sun (oil used to be plants, topsoil is mostly plant material...) itself so the ideal solution considering thermodynamics would be to have the form to be a minimal number of transformations from the source as possible.
Shh.
I love flying Electric RC stuff. One of the major considerations for an RC power system is weight, which is why NIcd is going out, and LiPo is all the rage now.
:)
The article was really scant on details, does anyone know approximately what the weight of this device will be? Will fuel cells be able to replace typical LiPo batteries in RC aircraft?
PS, typing this live from my Karaoke show, stop by and say hi
I thought I once heard that buckyball molecules were extremely hazardous to humans (they would slice/punch holes in cells due to their hardness and not easily got rid of)
And this device is supposed to be powered from methanol?
Only in Capitalist America would a device constructed of hazardous materials, fueled by a flammable substance be allowed on an airplane while strictly forbidding toe-nail clippers. (or did the ban on them end?)
What makes it even sillier is that the milliwatt-hours is not a unit of power (but rather energy), and square centimeters is not a unit of volume (but rather area). It's about as bad as trying to measure your weight in feet, or the distance from NYC to LA in pounds.
...but nah, I don't think I'll link to wikipedia.
..but one thing you can't deny is that they innovate, unlike other notorious companies (ie. M$). Their engineers have developed some really great technologies over the years, but unfortunately, some screwballs within the company keep messing things up with excess baggage such as copy protection schemes.
It's funny how their media business has made alot of money, but it's also their media business that is handcuffing their electronics division from doing better. The executives then look at how well their media business is doing and then appoint the person in charge of it all (Howard Stringer) as CEO. So now their electronics business is even more screwed since they have a content guy in charge. So instead of content supporting their electronic sales, they have electronics supporting their content business.
Sony should get back to it's roots (no pun intended), and focus on innovative new technologies, and tell it's content and media business to stay out of it.
They're using an extremely unusual way of representing the power but lets have a stab at working out how close this is to a battery. 100milliwatts/hrs per square centimetre. Assume a device has a surface area of 4cmx5cm where the stuff could be placed, thats 20cm^2 so that's 2watt hrs. A rechargable NiMH AA is 1.2volts and can go up to 2500mah so 1.2volts * 2.5amps = 3watt hrs So this currently provides 2/3 the power of an AA in a surface area roughly the size of a battery compartment for two AA's. Not a bad start but it needs to get at least twice as efficient for it to be able to compete with lithium- cells
It means that if a AA battery was made out of the stuff, you would need 2 of them in a row to get 2/3 the power of one normal dry fuel cell AA battery. Not very efficient, and current technology means that this is not cheap.
It also means that even the worst laptop battery outlasts this tech by several miles.
- d
Um... no. The proper unit for measuring usefulness of a battery *is* watt hours. How much energy it can supply us with is *exactly* what we want to know.
And the area measurement would be odd if we were talking about a conventional battery, but in this case it's a buckyball *film*. Which really is quite two dimensional.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
The film is just a barrer where the reaction takes place. The power is proportional to the area and the total energy is proportional to the volume of fuel.
You can fix anything with duct tape and sticks.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6458
Carbon molecules called "buckyballs" - which hold great promise for nanotechnology - but have been shown to harm fish have been made safer by scientists.
The soccer-ball-shaped carbon nanoparticles were shown to cause brain damage in fish and kill water fleas in a study in March 2004. But now a team at Rice University in Houston, Texas, US, has come close to understanding how buckyballs - more formally known as fullerenes - kill cells and how their toxicity can be lowered in human cells.
Although the toxic nature of the carbon-60 nanoparticles may be useful in medicine, for example in fighting cancer, there are concerns that their potentially widespread use in fuel cells, drug delivery and cosmetics could mean they find their way into the environment, and so into animals and humans.
"There are a couple of different manufacturers that will, and are, mass producing fullerenes," says Christie Sayes, one of the team. "They could make it into consumer based products: fuel cells and batteries or make-up," she says.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
However, all these devices run off ethanol and kerosene, which are relatively nontoxic. Methanol is very volatile and very toxic. I wouldn't want any kind of atmosphere vented storage system for methanol kept indoors. During the oil crisis of the 70s I briefly ran my motorcycle on methanol, and it is a real pig to handle. Years of research have gone into handling gasoline, as a result of which its use in cars is pretty safe, but it was originally a very dangerous fuel indeed.
My own preference would be a system like that for LPG where you have reusable cartridges which are refilled either at the retailer using a purpose designed system, or returned to a central depot. My guess is that it will be a repeat of the ink cartridge scam^h^h^h^hmarketing opportunity, with disposable cartridges containing methanol and a small pressure bladder to force it out, sold for a price just slightly more attractive than additional lithium cells.
Pining for the fjords
No, you are dumb. Nuclear batteries aren't tiny reactors, they are powered by the energy released through radioactive decay. They have no moving parts, the exist, and they work.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
i burd throu nine - no - TEN glasess of th stuf!!
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
If you use your laptop until its battery dies on the train, aircraft etc, you're screwed until you can plug it into a power socket, and leave it there an hour or two. Whereas if you have a fuel cell laptop, you pick up a disposable recharge at the airport lounge, psshht into a refueling hole, switch back on, ready to go.
Fuel is the most compact chemical energy store. That's why a car can run much further on a tank of gas than a whole bank of batteries. So a fuel cell will last longer than a battery, and you'll be able to carry a week's backup fuel supply in a small aerosol-type can. Also, because of being long-lasting, not every fuel cell need be user refillable. One-shot sealed "disposable batteries" are possible, which you either throw away or return to the vendor for recycling and money back.
Nothing about fuel cells implies lugging a 10 liter gas can from your local garage to refuel your digital camera. That's as ignorant as thinking you'd need to own an oil-well to run a car.
Fuel cells will be nothing more than a change of habit. You'll adapt and be fine.
These buckyfilm batteries still have a way to go. At 100mWh:cm^2, rolled around gaps for methanol flow, they might get 1W:cm^2, which is 3.6Mj:liter. Battery volumetric energy density about 1Mj:l, while the same (biased) source reports their own sodium borohydride offers 26.3Mj:l, (over 7x), while the more practical and directly comparable DMFCs they mention from their competitors offer about 17.3Mj:l (4.8x).
The buckyfilm offers a flexible material, which combined with tactile sensor fabrics and flexible displays will make mobile computing even more convenient. With this early effort already within 20% of the efficiency of inflexible DMFCs, we might be very close to smart clothes and upholstery, integrating computing into all common devices without transforming them into "computers". That might sound pretty dull, but "pedestrian" has come to mean both "completely ordinary" and "conveniently mobile". Fabric is one of the older technologies on which our civilization is based, and revolutionized us when we became smart. Maybe its time to do it again by returning the favor.
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make install -not war