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Build Your Own Band-aid Fuel Cell
ptorrone writes "Here's how to make a fuel cell from a band-aid...This has got to be the simplest way to build a fuel cell from scratch. The design is ridiculously simple, whilst being effective - it will allow you to explore the concepts of fuel cells in a ludicrously simple way."
Sounds... Simple
Can't we all just get along
Still requires you to buy specialty parts to complete. Sure, its a nifty idea. But so is trying to make a V8 engine out of soda cans. You'd still have to buy some parts to make it work right. Let me know when you can do it from just the store bought items.
AccountKiller
I see a bit more than a bandaid in the directions.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
High quality indeed... maybe that stuff would keep the mosquitoes out. And the airborn bacterium. So basically, build a fuel cell, and use one part known by laymen? Impressive. Why don't they just put the bandage on the outside of a ballard fuel cell bus?
I have freaks! I did something right...
how many watt-hours, at how many volts? and, just as important, is it rechargable?
anyhow, the bandaids were incidental. the "mea" part was $47.50. it's a heck of an expensive battery, even if IS a WONDER battery.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Gypsies used a similar trick to get free lunch, they called it "nail soup". Tell the host that you can cook a "nail soup", a soup based on a nail.
Ingredients:
- One big nail
- Water
- Groats
- Bacon
- Salt, Spices, Herbs
- (...some more foodstuffs, I don't remember).
The idea was to cook a basic groats-based soup with nail in it. The nail didn't provide anything to the soup except of curiosity factor that made the host to provide the rest of the ingredients. The gypsy would eat one bowl, the host another, the nail would be saved for another cooking of the soup...
Here they use band-aid instead of the nail.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Incredibly Easy Way to Build A Ludicrously Simple Potato Battery.
Materials list:
Any ones will do. Make sure you don't get a sweet potato.
If you want to get really techie and heavy about stainless steel fly screen, the material that I used was top-notch stuff! The stainless steel was 318 grade - very high quality!! The screen was 72 wires per inch in both directions, with each wire being 0.0037". This wire is available from the folks at the totally fabby www.potatobattery.com
Rather difficult to assemble yourself. Much simpler is to buy one that is already made from www.potatobattery.com .
At all times when working with the MEA, you will need to wear cotton gloves. This is because the muck on your hands will greatly inhibit the function of the MEA. Cotton gloves are available in specialty stores, but I love my pair from www.potatobattery.com
[...]
[Image]
The completed Band Aid Fuel Cell!
Testing the Band Aid Fuel Cell
To test the fuel cell you will need some 3% Methanol solution. Again you can get this from the Potato Battery store ( www.potatobattery.com ), unless you know a bit about chemistry or are friendly with a college lab technician.
[...]
Have fun, and be sure to tell all your friends!!!
I suppose it makes no difference what brand you use, but the marketing implications of this are phenomenal. Imagine having bandaids that don't glow but actually light themselves!
Add a nifty strobe effect and you'll have the perfect rave accessories anytime you fall off your bike!
You're mistaken...
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.
can't get much simpler than burning wood...
of course there is that double environmental issue caused by doing so.
Look, we have our current situation of burning fossil fuels and such because it is the simple solution. While the idea of wind power and solar power may appear simple the technology to make them viable solutions is anything but. Hell if it were simple we would have had someone marketing it to us day and night.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It seemed an awful lot of fuss to me, what's wrong with copper wire, steel wire, and a lemon? Now that's simple.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Wood isn't a fossil fuel. It's entirely renewable. Growing trees abstract CO2 from the atmosphere and release oxygen ..... spookily enough, exactly the same amounts of CO2 as you're going to produce and O2 as you're going to consume when you burn that wood. You were taught why in your third year chemistry classes. All the energy stored in the chemical bonds in plant matter originally came from the sun. As long as you plant enough trees, accounting for infant mortality, to replace the ones you are using up {which is not rocket science, just simple forestry management}, then you have a closed cycle. {Note that maintenance and harvesting require energy which is not released in burning, but there's no reason for this energy not to be sourced from renewables}. A tree being grown for energy should be harvested as soon as possible after its growth slows down, since beyond this point you are adding fewer kg. of wood, and hence MWh of energy, per day that passes. This is no different to killing a chicken for meat when its egg production slows down. Both come under the general heading of husbandry.
Where there is private ownership of land coupled with a high population density, there is an automatic incentive to make every square metre of land work for its keep. Poor forestry managers don't last long in that sort of climate; they invariably run out of money and get their business taken over by someone who can do the job properly. Basically what is happening is that the monetary value of the product is closely tracking the non-monetary value. The main failing of Capitalism as it is practised today is that it only takes notice of the monetary value of goods; but when non-monetary value is directly related to monetary value, then capitalism works.
Non-renewable energy appears cheap, because we're effectively stealing it from succeeding generations. The point will come eventually when it will cost more than renewable energy and that is when the world will have no option but to switch. The damage done by non-renewables is probably reversible, but that won't be anything like an instantaneous process.
I sometimes wonder if the answer to half the world's problems would not be to peg the world's currencies against the megawatt-hour, rather than the value of someting capricious like silver or gold. The price of crude oil being tied to the US dollar doesn't count: that is just as capricious, and the USA has a nasty tendency to invade countries who mention pricing their oil by the Euro.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Let's see how long it takes 'til someone figures out to power the timer for some bomb with a similar design and we can't get band aids anymore.
"Sorry bud, you're bleeding and we can't do anything to avoid infections. But doesn't it give you a fuzzy warm feeling that it's all done for national security?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People wanting to look at this seriously should buy the PDF instruction book available from http://www.goodideacreative.com/fuel_cell.html. I got one, and it's good :) Damned good. I'm thinking about getting some other ones ( eg the solar one looks interesting too ).
5. There are power points on the walls with electricity coming out of them which costs about 7p a kWh in the daytime, or 3p in the dead of night.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The current economic system (especially in North America) is so out of whack with reality it's not even funny. We pay actors and atheletes millions of dollars, and they produce nothing. Yet we pay farmers, who produce every scrap of food on our plate, to whom we owe our very survival, next to nothing. In many cases, not even enough to maintain their own farms. Sometimes I think we need some sort of catastrophe, like running out of oil, to snap us out of our fantasy world and back to reality.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This is remarkably like an article I once wrote about how to make a fission generator with stuff lying around the house. It turns out not everyone else has the same stuff lying around the house as me.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Well, that may be simple, but it is hardly a fuel cell.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...and blowjobs. Lot's of 'em.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Ludicrous, simply ludicrous. Got to love that word, "ludicrous". Everyone, find a situation and use it in your conversation today and report back. Extra points if you used WHILST talking with your employer. Ludicrously yours, Me
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
A) Reference?
B) How come my ducts are sealed with it?
It would appear that the submitter of the story is Phillip Torrone, the host of the MAKE blog (and apparently a Senior Editor?). I'd like to think that's not really the case: MAKE is really cool and this fuel cell is really lame. The worst part is that now I have that stupid "I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me" jingle running through my head.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Wikipedia cites the OED, unfortunately you have to pay to see it online.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_tape
"I sometimes wonder if the answer to half the world's problems would not be to peg the world's currencies against the megawatt-hour, rather than the value of someting capricious like silver or gold."
Either way, it would likely be better than pegging the world's currencies to exactly nothing, which is the current system. It's certainly an interesting idea... the problem is savings. How do you store a megawatt-hour? I've read that at night the wholesale price of electricity can drop to zero because there's more being produced than consumed, because it's just too expensive to shut down a generator that's going to be urgently needed in just a few short hours. The retail price of a megawatt hour where I live probably about $100. I can store $100 in about 8 ounces of silver, or a few grams of gold. If you can make a battery that can store a megawatt-hour per pound (and hold its charge!) you'd be really onto something (apart from having laptops that could run for weeks on a single charge).
What was I expecting from a "bandaid fuel cell" in an article from a magazine named MAKE?
Well, perhaps something describing how to build a fuel cell that doesn't require an expensive (and sometimes difficult to obtain) membrane, or catalyst. I was saying to myself "Finally, someone has figured out how to use saranwrap (or something similar) as the membrane for a simple fuel cell".
I suppose if it was that simple, the companies would already be doing it - or would they? How many other times in our recent history have companies passed on simple and effective technologies for a product simply because you couldn't patent the crap out of them? Could fuel cells be any different? I wonder the same thing about solar technology - is there a way to make a better (or at least cheaper to build) copper oxide solar cell, or an easier to build organic solar cell (you know the ones I am talking about, which use cranberry juice or whatnot). In the case of a fuel cell, the expensive and hard to obtain parts seem to be the catalyst material and membrane (in the case of the bandaid fuel cell, it seems that the membrane you buy is just a combination of both in a pre-made stack). In the case of a homemade solar cell, the difficult piece is the front transparent conductor: It is difficult to make transparent conductive glass (silvering is one method, but it require chemicals that are heavily regulated today thanks to things like the PATRIOT Act - no kidding! - plus the chemicals are difficult to handle and expensive to purchase) - so most homemade solar cells, especially the copper oxide ones, use saltwater as a transparent conductor. I have also given thought to "silkscreening" a very, very thin layer of Artic Silver paste compound onto glass to act as a conductor, but I am not sure that would work, either.
At any rate, this article did nothing to cause me to get excited and MAKE something. For a toy experiment, it isn't worth it. I would have been much more impressed had they detailed building a solar powered stirling engine from empty cola cans and a fresnel magnifier...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Lets see; bandaids, wire screen, scalpel, volt meter, sissors, cotton gloves, 3% solution of methonal. Got it. I can go to my local stores, and purchase the stuff, no problem.
Ok, I'm looking at the "5 Layer DMFC MEA", not so simple, How can I do a "McGiever" on this?
Now for a logistics question, "What would it take to apply this solution to an average home for One Year?" This would be VERY interesting.
One thing you can do is use electricity to pump water up from a reservoir at the bottom of a mountain to a reservoir at the top when demand is slack, and use that to spin a turbine when needed. There's a plant in Wales that does just that. You don't need to store the actual electricity that represents someone's savings in a battery, as long as you can prove that you have the capacity to produce it as fast as they can consume it. In fact, you are storing the energy in a way -- just in the form of gravitational potential energy in several megalitres of water, or chemical potential energy in unburned fuel. As for transporting the electricity to the people, I had this radical idea of running cables under the streets to each building, thereby maintaining a continuous supply with no breaks while swapping batteries. Of course, it might never catch on .....
Also, instead of being like the traditional banks where you would go in with a banknote and exchange it for a certain amount of silver or gold, I can see people turning up at the local Sojiedade Munizipal de Illuminacion y Traccion with anything that burns, and exchanging it for banknotes!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I had this in my head instead:
Cause what the world needs now
is a new Frank Sinatra
so I can get you in bed.
Cause what the world needs now
is another folk singer
like I need a hole in my head.
Karnal
This Band-Aid Battery strikes me as a really temporary, stop-gap solution.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
I used to work in the industrial heating industry and we used a buttload of duct tape to seal the heating ducts. Worked a treat. You mean the plastic-y tape, right? Because I thought the fabric-backed stuff was gaffer tape, so called because film crews use so much of the stuff. I know this is completely unrelated to a bandaid fuel cell, but the bandaid fuel cell was shit. I wonder if the guy's books are any better?
sustainable living
I know for a fact that there are over 26 elements preceding the alleged first element "Hydrogen"
You know this do you? Might I ask how you know this? Hydrogen is the first element because it has one proton in it's nucleus (I say one proton, because that's the only thing for certain thanks to ions,) not because of some kind of political "we like hydrogen better than firstium" style of thing. The way the periodic table works is each element in the table has a certain number of protons in their nucleus and they are ordered by this. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, you must have zero protons in the nucleus. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, it must be just an electron or a neutron floating around somewhere, not an actual atom at all and therefore not an "element."
I don't really understand why you even said this though. No one ever said anything about needing elements before hydrogen for it to work or something.
Oh, and leave string theory out of this. It's clear you don't even know what it is. It's not a political movement or something, to put it really simply, it has to do with quantum particles and the theory that it may be possible for some to be essentially connected to each other so that one will respond to the other. No murders have occured over this theory and it's quite silly to even think it possible. There's nothing in it to murder for.
I would suggest that everyone else take this person's statements with a grain of salt. It can't hurt to read up on the Joe Cell if you want, but, simply put, if it were so simple as that, don't you think people would be capitalizing on this? Even if you are scared of "the Illuminati" coming after you, the potential profits are enough to hire a host of bodyguards.