Self-Heating Can

nickprecision writes "Ontro has been working for a while, and they are about ready to get to the public market. Quite a nifty little self-heating can... imagine the uses. Read up so you know about it when your friends pull one out on the ski hill."

Re:RTFA

[pubjames]

Clearly neither you, nor the dumb-assed moderaters who modded you up, nor the other dumb-asses who posted the exact same thing as you, nor the dumb-asses who modded them up, bothered to follow the link.

If you had, you would have seen:

"While on a trip overseas in the early 1990s, Ontro's founders, Jim Scudder and Jim Berntsen, came upon an interesting product ... a beverage container that would heat its contents without the benefit of external energy sources (microwave, heating element, etc.). They soon found similar products in other parts of the world, but all had two very significant problems."

Followed by information about what makes their product different.


This is what is known as promoting your product. What do you think they would say? Our product is exactly the same as the others? It's more expensive?

There is nothing revolutionary about this product. It works in pretty much the same way as the products available in Europe and other places.

Don't be so critical of other posters and moderators. People might think you're a dumbass yourself.

Environmental Impact?

[zerosignal]

Disposable cans are bad enough, but with a heating element there's much more waste to be disposed of. And I suspect these would be much harder to recycle - it would have to be dismantled into its component parts.

Re:they've be at it since 98

[bleckywelcky]

I haven't gone camping in a little bit, but I know things like this have been out for a long time. Maybe they're not the same implementations, as I have mainly just used the self heating meal packages, but I'm sure the idea behind it all is the same. You just have a certain chemical mix that will produce some heat when combined, and the chemicals are seperated until the user does something (the ones I used had you pull a string) and then they are combined. Here, it appears that the user needs to push a button on the bottom of the can to mix the chemicals, and they seem to just be mixing calcium oxide with water - which is definitely an exothermic process. From Encyclopedia.com [encyclopedia.com]:

Calcium oxide is a basic anhydride, reacting with water to form calcium hydroxide ; during the reaction (slaking) much heat is given off and the solid nearly doubles its volume.

And these setups were no joke, the meals came out piping hot. Anyways, this technology has been out for several years back since the mid to later 1990s, and this appears to just be another implementation of it - although that's not to say it isn't useful. Carrying a can around with you and being able to push a button to heat its contents up is still neat.

A few links to some of the self heating meal packages:

AlpineAire Foods [alpineairefoods.com] - I believe these were the packages I had previously used. It appears as though they have discontinued production of their self heating meals.

Heater Meals [heatermeals.com] appears to have the user apply the water themselves. I've never used these before, but they look to be more of an emergency situation use. Still, self heating meals!