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Technology

Portable Fuel Cell Technology 286

Posted by Hemos from the small-clean-almost-as-good-as-fusion dept.
Quite a number of people have been writing about the announcement from Motorola concerning their new fuel cell. The new approach is an innovative one. They are using methanol, wood fuel alcohol, in a patented approach. Power claims are "twenty hours for laptops" and a month for cell phones - and it's small enough and light enough that it could simply replace a battery. I'd love to have something that could do that - better than the maybe-an-hour-and-a-half with my Vaio.
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Portable Fuel Cell Technology More

Portable Fuel Cell Technology

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  • Everyone's missing one important point. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Weight! These batteries not only weigh less given teh smae volume, you need less volume for the same battery life. Most people only need 10 hours of battery life a day, but imagine how much smaller and lighter these new notebooks and PDA's will be (especially if the used a Transmeta processor)

  • Re:Poision (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Eventually, Methanol won't be used at all. As soon as an infrastructure for Hydrogen fill ups is in place, Methanol Fuel Cells will be brought out of production. And Hydrogen is an even MORE effective fuel for these batteries.
  • And one more fun fact about methanol is... it burns with an invisible flame, unlike those nifty little ethanol burners you may remember from chemistry class. Set a puddle of methanol on fire, and all you'll see is a little heat haze.

    IIRC, methanol is used to fuel Formula 1 racing cars. The Learning Channel had some interesting footage of drivers leaping out of crashed cars, slapping their clothing, rolling around, and eventually being extinguished by the emergency crew -- all with no visible fire or smoke.
  • I thought Manhattan Scientifics owned the patent on the Los Alamos mini fuel cell? The yahoo article implies (to me) that Motorola is using the same technology, but makes no mention of MHTX. What's up??

    (made a good chunk of change on MHTX! 1.4->6.4, yippee!).

    nick
  • Hi UL: who are the Inheritors of Iridium?

    (eheh, sounds like a corny sci-fi book)

    but seriously...

    thanks!
  • IIRC The US Champ Car series (Formerly Indy Car) uses methanol, but Formula 1, which uses pressurized pumps during pitstops, still uses racing gasoline. Champ Car switched decades ago due to the high probability of fuel cell rupture in accidents on US superspeedway tracks. You are correct about the fire safety benefits, methanol can be diluted with water, gasoline just floats on top.
  • Hmm, is Motorola cooperating with Manhattan
    Scientifics in this area? The article on Yahoo
    wasn't very clear.
  • The alcohol will probably evaporate faster than the TM processor will use. :)

    That'll be real fun, when we can pop a alcohol cart into the Crusoe powered webpad and not have to worry about changing any batteries in it for a couple months.

    We may not have all the cool stuff people thought we would have in the year 2000, but we're certainly hell-bent on making it happen.
    _______
    computers://use.urls. People use Networds.

  • Sounds more like a USENET spelling flame war to me. It was understood what the guy meant. It still drives me up the wall when I see people use incorrect forms of words, but I've deemed it best to not bother to say anything.
  • Well, you _also_ can't use a cell phone in an airplane because:

    1)It just couldn't hook up to the cellular network - you're too far away and moving too fast (probably over large areas with no coverage)

    2)If it did, you wouldn't use the phones built into the plane, would you?

    While there is probably a good technical reason to prohibit people from using cel phones on planes, I suspect the prohibition stems from business reasons.
  • >little vials of combustable poisionous liquid

    You mean duty-free whiskey? In any case I'd pop for a fuel cell that ran on that.
  • they won't even let you take Everclear on board a plane for fear of explosion... Do I really want to be smoking in the airplane lav and have my laptop explode and force me to give up my ability to have kids? No thanks :) NiCAD's and LI's sound safest to me :)

  • Dead (Score:1)

    by ragnarok ( 6947 )
    We're sorry for the inconvienience. The information you've requested is temporarily unavailable
  • Apparently the concept of humor continues to elude you.
  • Have a look here:
    http://www.manhattsci.com/media_center/pressrele ase12.htm

    It looks like these guys came up with basically the same thing, a year ago.
  • *Ahem*... if you want a small machine, you need low power. ALL the power expended in a computer becomes heat, and you have to get rid of it lest it melts the case. Remember the Apple Powerbooks that caught fire?
  • What's with the "long battery life negates low power processor" stuff? Surely they compliment each other quite nicely.

    Lets say that a fuel cell can run a portable for 20 hours when it would normally run for 3. Call it 6 times the normal life, just to be conservative. Now, digging around AMD gives me the info that their K6-III portable CPU consumes (I hate trying to read these things) 2 Watts of power, compared to Trasmeta's 1W. That would mean that a similar portable would run for 40 hours...

  • .. would be not 1 month on a regular cell phone, but just a few days for a satellite phone. They are too big and power hungry and expensive now - and I need one (why? - mountaneering...)...
  • They were mostly talking about mobile applications - not cars. There it is not against $1.25/gallon, but agains $1+ per AA battery, or $70 per battery with a need for hourly recharging...
  • This is awful! Now what am I going to use to heat my lap?

    :-)
  • Still no competition for your good stuff or the 'shiners -- that's grain alcohol, aka, ethanol.

    The story says methanol, wood alcohol -- if you drink that you'll be lucky if you just go blind.

  • I seriously doubt that this will be that dangerous, no more so than drinking a glass of brandy at least or using a butane lighter. I imagine it will be much safer than driving a car.

  • Re:Yup (Score:1)

    by Otto ( 17870 )
    Don't tell me you've never done EverClear shots?

    BTW, Everclear = 194 (?) proof. Darn near as pure as Ethanol gets.


    ---
  • I can see it now, having to surrender you battery at the gate before boarding the plane.

    Being a smoker, and careless by nature, I'm sure that someday I would start a fire in my laptop.
  • No sarcasm. If a normal notebook runs on 5W, and Transmeta's runs on 1W, then you have 5x the battery life. If you then have fule cells running laptops for 10x as long then one would suppose that Transmeta's CPU with this fulecell could actually run for 50x as long or about 100 hours!
  • Cool,
    So we all get to have our computers running for months on end, our calculators running for years on end, and LEDs running infinately. Just think. We would make some super bright LEDs, use them for lights all over, and just hook up one of these power cells. Think of the power it would save!
  • Look into mhtxe, they are most likely the company that is doing the actual research. The fuel cells would run on a mixture of water and methonal, not pure methanol, and the mixture would mostly be water, so the explosive nature would not be a problem.
  • One company that is actively developing this type of fuel cell, Manhattan Scientifics, is achieving power densities much lower than you are imagining. A cell of the size suggested in the article would produce less than one watt of power, not the oodles of power that are blowing your mind. It is possible that they could stack them and come close to replacing a convetional battery in a laptop computer, but that is not their target market.
  • Well, I travel with a little vial containing liquified butane with an attached, ready to use, miniturized combination gas valve and sparking mechanism with me on airplanes all the time and they dont seem to mind. I think those issues probably have good technical solutions.

    I dont think it will include carrying glass vials of methanol and little plastic funnels.

    Lets hope that this can be done with ethanol in the future anyway. That would make fueling up as easy as popping open one of those airline beefeater gin bottles...or two.



  • It's not that easy to convert methane to methanol. However, the farm *is* still the right place for it: corn and other crops can be converted to alcohols, including methanol and ethanol and beer :-)
  • It sort of looked like the most important reason for Crusoe, according to one of the presenters, was the fact that it uses little enough power that you could perhaps actually watch a DVD before your batteries die.

    Fuel cells could make this all irrelevant.

    On to the Viking Laptop:

    • Runs on alcohol.
    • A Merced chip where the heat sink attaches to a cider heater. Hot cider for everyone.
    Perfect for all your party needs!
  • Sorry, I just can't resist.
    So, Microsoft has this "pure science" R&D department they've spent billions on, and they still haven't come up with anything as neat as this in all these years (oh, sorry, talking paperclip).
    Yet, Moto comes along, thinking, hey, we could sell more cell phone chips if people thought they could use them without running their batteries dead after 2 hours. . .

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".

  • Well... (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )
    ValuJet shouldn't have too much of a problem with it. After all, it's still safer than, oh, large numbers of oxygen cylinders in the storage hold.
  • Anyone catch the expected date of arrival for this new technology? I'm officially labeling this as a "Vaporfuel" - for more reason than one. :P
    Joe.
  • I hope you realize that those other (unnamed) sources of power will also take some time to develop and make feasible. It's not like within the five years of developing handheld methanol power sources, pocket fusion devices will suddenly become ubiquitous or anything.

    This reminds me of a time that an acquaintence was asking me, "Well, why didn't they just make these more powerful processors and game engines *earlier*, rather than make us waste all of our money having to keep on upgrading?" I tried explaining to her how it takes some time to actually research and develop things, and that these designs don't come to fruition instantaneously - it requires experience, and work built up atop work, and other factors which require that time pass before new things can be invented. Otherwise we'd already have widespread fusion generators powering 3GHz quantum computers and 12Gbit wireless Internet connections on our bodyheat-powered wearable GFlop supercomputers.

    This portable methanol power cell is in its infancy, but any "greater technology" isn't exactly going to appear overnight before this comes to fruition.

    Progress is a linear set of steps, a process of innovation and improvement and creation and invention, not a sudden end to a desire. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but father time is what got her pregnant.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a . [nmsu.edu]

  • The idea of a UPS is that when your power goes down (a rare event) your computer stays up. (Or goes down gracefully if that is not possible.)

    The fuel cell technology would mean that you need to replace the fuel after x uses, but you could also have a much longer uptime. That trade-off could well be worth it.

    Regards,
    Ben
  • That would be a tremendous improvement over the current situation. My Windows laptop acts like it's running off crack!
  • The methanol fuel is toxic, but the by-products aren't

    This isn't quite true. Carbon dioxide is poisonous in sufficient quantities, and could cause the respiratory system to fail if the partial pressures get thrown out of whack. No big deal if you're running a whole bunch of these things in a very large closed system (say, the Earth). A big deal if enough of these are running in a small enclosed system (say, a safe). I suspect the risk of suffocation, even if everyone on a crowded jet were running two cells simultaneously (laptop and cd player?), would be just about zero, but it is a low-grade potential problem. Gods know it's enough of a problem to get pseudoscientists up in arms...you know, the same people who refuse to buy aluminum pans on the grounds that it might cause Altzheimer's Disease...

  • You'd be able to run a Palm for months off the little free bottles of alcohol they give away on planes!

    Actually, that begs a question. How easy is it for a household to make the stuff these fuel-cells require. I've read stories about cars powered from processed leftover french-fry oil - could people refine their own fuel for fuel cells?

    "The alcohol keeps my fuel cells charged... BURRARP!" - Bender, from Futurama.

  • are water-proof computers a possibility?
    Not with these cells - they need to breath.

    After thinking for a while, I'm not sure I like the idea of CO2 emissions in a typical high-rise. The building I work in has the worse air-con system. The air just doesn't move. I have a small fan pointed at my portable to stop it overheating simply because the hot air doesn't move away from the PC fast enough. I don't think I'd like the CO2 concentraition to be slowly increasing around every PC, at least not without some sort of warning device if it gets too high...

  • No need for overnight charges, no need for battery swap stations, no need for anything but someone to make the cars.
    I am often dismayed at how quickly someone will dispose of all technologies because a single promising one is announced or released. This is no exception.

    Fuel cells are not an entire solution to powering vehicles. A Hybrid system will be much more likely. Imagine a non-rechargable power source, like the fuel cell, combined with a rechargable system that gains power from things like regenerative brakes and solar cells. Add charging stations that are supplied by green power and you've got yourself an ultra efficient, ultra-low emission vehicle. A fuel cell by itself misses out on many opportunities to save power - I believe that every large power system needs a rechargable portion...

  • While it's mainly about speed, neatness counts too. You have to turn off your car when you refuel - have you ever seen a fuel spill in a Formula 1 pit? Better to swap carefully prepared and mostly sealed cartridges than play with the liquid directly. Think toner ;)
  • You should have a look at my "droptanks" page [geocities.com] - there are a few external battery systems there that might make you think of alternatives. Take the portable. Imagine the the internal 2.5 Li-ion battery stays as is, but the clip-on becomes a fuel cell. I typically have access to power at work during the week and at home over the weekend (saves my carrying the power adapter every day, or buying a second one). Occasionally during the week I need more than 2 hours use of the computer at home, so I clip on the external pack. There has only been a single week where I've totally drained the 6 hour pack.

    Mix and match...

  • I know, 'cause 12 hours off an AA just sucks ;)

    (proud Rio owner)

    Actually, I'm surprised that more people aren't mentioning digital cameras as a class of devices likely to benefit heavily from these fuel cells...

  • It has to be idiot proof. I plug in my portable - the battery charges, I unplug the portable - battery discharges. I don't want to have to worry about Hazmat procedures (like I have to for lead-acids used for home solar and wind systems). I've got to be able to plug it in to traditional equipment without needing a degree in Electrical Engineering. It needs to be robust. I need to be able to crush it under a hardcover book without it leaking on something, or igniting.

    And for me, it needs to be close in price per mAh to existing stuff. Premium should match increase in power available between refills (ie; A$2 AA battery lasts 12 hours in Rio. A fuel-cell AA that lasts 24 hours could cost up to A$5. 48 hours, A$12. I value not having to carry extra cells, as well as the total power delivered). I could probably express this better if I had more time, but I dont...

  • If they don't discharge, and the response time is small enough, then you might be able to use them as a UPS. Again, perhaps a hybrid rechargable and fuel-cell combo would give you protection against frequent little problems *and* provide hours of power in a blackout. Maybe you could keep servers up, rather than just having time to shutdown nicely...
  • Who wants batteries that need to be replaced all the time (expensive)!
    I agree. Perhaps some sort of hybrid power system could be developed for portable devices. A Li-ion rechargable that's used first, with a fuel-cell only kicking in if the rechargable battery gets drained. That way you might be able to last a day on the rechargable cell before starting to drain the non-rechargable one.

    In fact, that could be done with existing hardware. Imagine a fuel-cell "droptank" that could be attached to the back of a, say, PalmVx. You'd still want to plug it in at every opportunity, but if you had to go a long time without recharging, you could.

    The really nice thing about the fuel cells is that the power density will significantly aid in the functionality of wireless stuff like Bluetooth...

  • It'll be interesting if this technology gets people used to refilling their computers with liquid -- even if it currently happens to be alcohol instead of petroleum products. Why? Because it brings the British one step closer to being able to seriously enter the computer market. Sooner or later, someone's going to invent a computer that leaks oil!


    ---

  • Yay (Score:2)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 )
    Wow. Groundbreaking technology. They say they might have a working model in 5 or 6 years....
  • Hmm.
    Yes. It is toxic, along with MANY OTHER things we use.
    Rubbing alcohol? That's toxic.
    Gasoline? That's toxic. Hair spray? Toxic. Lead-acid batteries? Toxic. Normal nickel-cadmium batteries? Toxic. Nickel-metal Hydride batteries? Toxic.

    These cells would not be some kind of highly toxic thing. Yes, if you eat them, it will hurt you, possibly badly. This is far from something new to our society.
    As for 'explosions'.... ever read those notices on batteries 'Do not dispose of in fire or it may explode?'. How is this different?
    Like pen cartridge? Many plastics are *stronger* than aluminum, and *more* puncture resistant.

    As for pollution.. what are the end byproducts? How are they worse than current heavy-metal batteries? What about methanol fuel in racecars? they burn far more in a single day of racing than I bet the US would use in a year.

  • I suspect you've never used one of those cartridge loaded fountain pens. I have, and so the way I interpretted the article is that the fuel cell (the expensive bit) is not replaced, but rather a small plastic tube full of methanol (the inexpensive bit) which powers the fuel cell is replaced.
  • There's a difference though, between, an unknown entrepeneur (scam artist?) and Motorola :)

    Though I'd still be curious about seeing more than a press release...

  • Oops, that should be Jordan, not Jordaon :(

    I did press preview, honest, but Netscape had locked and, in hammering on the button to make it do something I must have slipped. Oh well...

    Greg
  • I have a feeling it's considerably more flammable. Seeing as how they use it to fuel race cars, whereas I've seen people have a LOT of trouble trying to get whiskey and vodka to ignite and stay lit for an extended period of time (more than 5 seconds). When it is burning though, there's almost no visible flame. Baccardi 151 is pretty volatile though. But how many people carry that in large quantities?
  • Get a Crusoe-driven device, fit it with a quality sound card, power it off this fuel cell, and start putting DJs out of business. You can carry the same amount of music a lot easier in MP3 than on CDs, and get more "useful" space (weed out unwanted tracks).
  • How do you figure that?

    The low power consumption of the Crusoe processor means that the fuel cell that lasts only 20 hours with an intel processor based laptop will last a lot longer - sure, more people don't use a laptop for longer than this between recharges, but what about for people in the field, where they don't have access to power for days at a time?

    Also, the low power consumption of the Crusoe means it gives off less heat - which is an advantage all of it's own.
  • As long as it just sat in the corner and didn't do anything sure.

    But movement takes power too remember :P
  • There was just a report circulating (sorry, no URLs, this was a dead tree report I saw) from the ICAO [icao.org] Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme discussing the banning of potentially explosive or flammable consumer electronics goods from all commercial flights. This report was just out in December, and all countries are required to show proposed laws by the next meeting sometime this year.

    The report discussed the offer from a company (can't remember which) that makes the explosives detectors used in many airports. These are the machines which a security droid wipes the handle of your bag with a swab and sticks it inside a little detector. This company has developed a range of hand-held detectors to look for butane cigarette lighters and the exact same fuel-cells being developed by Motorola. They have petitioned the Safety Oversight Committee to create some regulations banning fuel cells and certain types of cigarette lighters. That way they can sell thousands of these detectors the moment the laws go into effect in a country.

    Since there is money behind this, I would bet on their being some rules in place against fuel cells before the computer industry starts using them in any large quantity. A few years ago the portable computer manufacturers got together and forced the ICAO to drop a proposed international rule outlawing all portable computers from use in cabin. It was a close battle, since the portable computer industry didn't exist when the rules were first proposed, but the ICAO takes years to get all nations to adopt their new rules as law. It was literally at the last minute the manufacturers got together and fought.

    There are still some countries (like switzerland) which require all passengers to check all electronics. Its a pain in the ass if you don't have a good solid computer bag, because your screen will tend to get broken. Now the main airlines flying out of Geneve have special handling for laptop computers, and will place all the laptops on a little cart behind the desk and store them in a special compartment in the hold.

    I'd love to have a computer which would run for all 12+ hours of a long flight. I could work my way through most of a game of CivIII-CTP, or maybe even get some work done :-)

    the AC
  • Besides powering laptop computers, this kind of technology would be great for certain types of survival (or wilderness) gear. Take aircraft, for instance. Most every airplane has an ELT, and emergency locater transmitter that goes off if the plane crashes. This ELT runs off batteries, batteries that have a limited run time, and need to be replaced every few years with fresh ones. Now our unfortunate pilot has one powered by a fuel cell that will last for days, if needed.

    How about two-way radios for backpackers, radios that can be refilled as needed, say for a week or so? I have to imagine that fluorescent camp lites powered by fuel cells would be better per quart of fuel than the fire-based Coleman lanterns. I suppose if you wanted to be really funny, you could even bring along a miniature fridge based on peltier devices and fuel cells.

    I guess we should be careful with technology, though, or pretty soon we would see boneheads and other twits taking their TV sets and boomboxes into the wilderness...
  • who are the Inheritors of Iridium?

    The rumor monger didn't sell me that info. B-) For all I know it's still the same folk.
  • They also fed samples to pigs to see if it would poison them. Thus was the term "blind pig" for an illegal bar derived.

    I have heard that the enzymes that process alcohol have a preference for ethanol - to the extent that (after inducing vomiting) you can reduce the ultimate damage further by getting roaring drunk on really GOOD booze for a couple days, keeping the enzymes busy mostly on ethanol until the remaining methanol is excreted in sweat and urine.

    I have NO idea if this is true. But it's a good excuse for the person who told me to get roaring drunk for a couple days every now and then. "Oops! I think that there was a little methanol in that last batch..." B-)

  • Ethanol can only be separated from water by distilation to a certain point. (I think it's 197 proof, or half that in percentage.) At higher concentrations the water evaporates fast enough to drive the percentage down, rather than up, in each distilation step.

    To go beyond that (mainly to produce something that sucks water out of other stuff), they need to extract the water from the ethanol by other means. This gets almost all the way to 100%, but leaves traces of more toxic stuff (such as benzene). That's why you don't want to drink the laboratory alcohol. (It also sucks the water out of your throat, which burns it and leaves you open to infection.)

    Of course ethanol itself is slightly toxic (as are vitiamins A, D, B6, and even C). But it's a toxin we have evolved to live with, since our intestinal flora procuce some whenever we've been eating veggies.
  • If it runs on methanol, it will probably also run on ethanol, or a mix of them.
  • I'm not a Chemist, so forgive my ignorance.

    Is Methanol much more volatile or explosive then hard liquor? People fly with multi-liter jugs of Vodka, Whisky and other flammable liquids all the time. Why is methanol different?

    -= stefan
  • I had to do exactly this when I flew on AEROFLOT from Delhi/India to Moscow. They confiscated all my batteries from my electrical devices in a little plastic baggy, then returned them at my destination.

    Apparently the reason they do this (the staff told me) is that indian passengers refuse to obey instructions about not using electrical devices at take off and landing so they confiscate all the batteries.

    Stange but true.

    OK, ok offtopic, slam me if you want....
  • Economies of distribution and commoditization, my friend.
    Precisely. Electricity is a commodity. Up to a point, it happens to be cheaper to build and install (and more convenient to feed) a few large generators than many small ones. Having a separate fuel-cell power supply for every light in your house is going to be far more expensive and demanding of your time than one big fuel cell for the whole house. Besides, with one fuel cell in the basement you can do things like having its waste heat bring your hot water up to temperature. Since you cannot do just one thing, you might as well make use of the possible synergies.
    --
  • That should be "your prefixes". "You're" is a contraction of "you are". Easy memory technique: possessive pronouns are not contractions and do not have apostrophes.

    (If irony was posted on Slashdot, would anybody notice? Oh, BTW, I fully expect self-righteous lousy spellers to moderate me down.)
    --

  • Battery exchange stations are quite feasible, but can you imagine the investment required to build what amounts to a complete parallel to the network of gasoline filling stations? It boggles my mind. On the other hand, there are fast-chargers which can fill most batteries in about 15-20 minutes; then the problem becomes one of generating and transmitting enough juice to feed them!

    Fuel cells are just a more efficient way to convert chemical energy into work. They have the advantage for many uses in that they perform very well at part load (the killer of the gasoline engine is its horrible fuel consumption at idle). The disadvantages of fuel cells are that they still require fuel. Under future tax regimes which will probably include stiff carbon taxes, this is still going to hit you at the pump even if your car gets 80 miles per gallon.
    --

  • At dollars to tens of dollars per fuel cell, plus all the refilling requirements of all their little fuel tanks, I'm sure you'd quickly see the wisdom of a centralized generator. Economies of scale, my friend. Economies of scale.
    --
  • Here's the link [bespoke.org] from the Viridian Mailing List Archive. Note the date on the article: December 30, 1998. Yup, over a year old. (Why's Slashdot so slow on some of these things?)
    --
  • Someday we will have booze-powered robots.
    :-)

    The press release was new, but Slashdot had something similar [slashdot.org] on New Year's Eve.


    Ignore typing errors, I'm still drunk myself.:)
  • ...they could switch the cell to burn ethanol and we'd have portable/potable fuel cells...

  • I just got done reading the technical whitepaper on how the new Transmeta Crusoe CPUs really work, and it sounds like mixing these fuel cells with the Crusoe processors would produce one of the best mobile computing platforms in the world. Super speed with amazing abilities to conserve power added to a more plentiful power source, hurrah!

    BTW, to understand why Transmeta is saying their CPUs won't perform well on existing benchmarks and will produce much better results in real life, read their whitepaper. In short, its because the processor excel at re-executing stuff, and benchmarks do things like using every single feature of a word processor once. When was the last time you did that?

    Esperandi
  • And there's a reason they use Methanol in Formula 1 racing. Safety. It can be put out with WATER, much unlike almost all other liquid fuels. Water and methanol 'mix', and when the methanol gets diluted enough, it won't burn. Tada, fire's out.

    I remember seeing one memorable (F1?) racing methanol fire on TV. The fuel 'sprayed' out when refueling the car in the pit, perhaps they forgot to stop pumping or pulled the nozzle out prematurely... and they *charge* these lines with some pressure to force all the fuel in within what, 5, 10 seconds, so they spilled quite a bit, and it caught.

    What was interesting was the wide angle distance shot, where 20 feet above the pit you saw the faint blue edges of the otherwise clear flames, and the massive optical disturbance created by that much super hot invisible flaming gas balling out then mushrooming up.

    Thing was, lots of people were scattering away, and one had gotten more than his share of 'splatter', and he ran off far enough, and with an invisible fire.. and with the pandamoneum of the main fire.. well, it took a few extra seconds for people to glance over and figure out what was going on with him...

    No worries. With the suits these pit crews wear, I think they all were ok. Lots of big 5 gallon buckets of water nearby, etc etc. But some excitement for sure.

    Lets see, I was in a hotel room in Alberta at a cousin's wedding... so that must have been the summer of 1992.

  • "from the small-clean-almost-as-good-as-cold-fusion dept."

    I've been waiting for a portable fuel cell for 10 years. Motorola says they're still 5 years off. Forgive me if I don't dump my laptop just yet...


    ---

  • You are right, a few specialized users will love the ability to go a few days without plugging their laptop in and without carring extra batteries, but this is a pretty small market. If a Pentium based laptop could achieve 8-12 hours of batter life while in constant use, and a few days of battery life while mostly sleeping, 99.9% of users are going to be happy. Crusoe will not be able to be viable company if it is only marketing its products to .1% of the market.
  • Have you ever eaten the food they serve on an airplane? If they object to you bringing a poison on board the plane, give them the same treatment... "Get some REAL food." Maybe next, some company will find a use for airplane food as a source of energy, instead of as a source for stomache cramps and diarrhea.
    ---------
    Thus Spake Dave
    Meine Hühner lachen Nicht!
  • Yes, methanol is much more volatile than vodka. Vodka is 40% ethanol and about 60% water. Ethanol (C2H5OH) has a much higher boiling point then methanol (CH3OH) and has a much lower partial presure at room temperature. This means that if you put some ethanol in one jam jar and put the same amount of methanol in another jar, put lids on them and shake them about, the vapour over the liquid in the jar containing mathanol has much more of the (flamable) alcohol in it than the vapour over the ethanol.

    The second issue is that methanol has a low flash point. The 'flash point' is basically the temperature at which a spark will cause the vapour to ignite (as opposed to the 'auto-ignite' temperature at which you don't need a spark). It's been too long for me to remember the exact numbers but as I recall a spark will set methanol off at about 11C (52F), well below room temperature. Ethanol has an only slightly higher flash point (12C I think) but because the vapour preasure is much lower it's much less likely to start a fire since there's less ethanol in the vapour to get things going. This means you're less likely to bring down the plane just because your plastic laptop rubbed against it's nylon bag.

    The flash point of a 40% ethanol, 60% water mix will be higher still which makes vodka much safer to transport and a refreshing drink when mixed with tonic and a twist of lime :-)
  • I worked in one of the labs at Los Alamos mentioned in the press release for about 18 months ending one year ago. If there is one thing I learned while working there it was this: be skeptical of fuel cell press releases (and probably any press release).

    Methanol is potentially really nice, but has always had problems with power density. It also requires a lot more platinum than hydrogen fuel cells to run efficiently.

    Some assorted comments:
    1. ethanol is not likely to be used in fuel cells unless there is a breakthrough.
    2. I helped with "Air breather" fuel cells a little in my work. However, these were hydrogen fuel cells and not methanol. It looks like a company is trying to commercialize it since I left (Air breather technology [poweronline.com])
    That link also has a super-simplified but accurate diagram of how a hydrogen fuel cell works.
    3. You will not drive a fuel cell car for a very long time as long as gas is $1.25/gallon.
    4. It wouldn't be economical to produce methanol from biomass. It will be made from natural gas. This would still leave us with a lot of CO2 emissions.

    Wait to see a working prototype before you get excited about ANY fuel cell announcement. The "air breather" hydrogen fuel cell works, but is still very expensive for the power you get. This cost will of course come down, but maybe not as much as other power sources (like lithium rechargables). I can tell you, the little details of making fuel cells work can be excruciating.
  • The CO2 output of these devices, from a global standpoint, is completely insignificant. One medium-sized forest fire would release more CO2 in a day than millions of these fuel cells running for decades.
    Here's the seat o' the pants math: They say the methanol containers are similar to fountain pen cartridges, so assume about 10g of methanol each. Methanol and cellulose (wood) produce roughly similar quantities of CO2 per unit mass when burned. So, if, say a BILLION people worldwide (everybody that has or is likely to have soon a cell phone or laptop) are using one of these a DAY (worst case), each, thats 1E10 grams (10 million kg or 10000 metric tons) of fuel consumed. A typical medium-sized tree might weigh 10 tons. So: it's equivalent to a forest fire burning 1000 trees/ day (pretty piddly by forest fire standards). These are rough numbers, but it's the inability or unwillingness to do this kind of guesstimate that makes so many people gullible believers in unfounded statements like the previous post.
  • Now a days you have to uy a battery what every two years, or when ever you get a new computer. So you hyave to plug it in every once in a while. I would much rather have to plug it in a still be able to use it then have to worry about buying 365 batteries for each year, at the price that they are saying:

    Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.

    That will be much more then I'm willing to spend per year just so that I can have 20 hours of battery life. Also that's assumeing that you only use your laptop 20 hours a day, not good enough for your run-of-the-mill hacker [tuxedo.org]

    Well that all I have to rant about

  • I'm not a Chemist, so forgive my ignorance.

    Well I am, and you're forgiven ;-)

    Is Methanol much more volatile or explosive then hard liquor? People fly with multi-liter jugs of Vodka, Whisky and other flammable liquids all the time. Why is methanol different?

    Methanol most certainly is more volatile than typical hard liquor, for two reasons. For one thing, methanol by itself is more volatile than ethanol, the alcohol in hard liquor. This is basically a matter of molecular weight; methanol's is lower than ethanol's and among related compounds the lower molecular weight typically has a lower boiling point. More importantly, methanol is a lot more volatile and flamable than hard liquor because it's pure. Hard liquor is typically only 40% alcohol by volume with the rest water. Compare the difference in flamability of vodka and everclear sometime- it's quite dramatic.

  • Does this mean that we can hook one of these up to a Transmeta CPU running Linux and it can stay going for a year without an outlet? </sarcasm>

  • Hmmm (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @03:01PM (#1356988)
    Someone else pointed out an EPA report on methanol, which is very toxic to humans and other animals as it is processed by the liver. With enough in your body you will die, non-lethal doasges will probably kill most if not all of your liver. I would be worried about replacable cartidges not being resilient enough to withstand dropping or some such (methanol has a low boiling point which means in alot of cases it would be gaseous). Batteries aren't safer for the most part but they are sealed pretty well, enough for use in your children's electronics. People talked about methanol replacement cartridges bought like replacable pen cartridges, I think I'd like a little heavier aluminum cases or something. Besides methanol's toxicity, there is the question of pollution. They will be producing water and carbon dioxide, humans produce much more than their share of carbon dioxide already, proliferation of this fashion of fuel cell would increase that. I'm all for the longer lasting battery but you have to weigh it's TOTAL cost against its apparent costs.

  • ha! (Score:3)

    by jetpack ( 22743 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:18PM (#1356989) Homepage
    This brings a whole new meaning the phrase: my battery is running out of "juice"! :)

  • One more way in which your cell phone is deadly. (Score:3)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:28PM (#1356990)
    Let's see, you can't use a cell phone on an aircraft taking off in case it screws up the electronics and everybody dies in a big fireball.

    People are killed every day while talking on the damned things in their car.

    There is still a controversy over whether holding a long-distance broadcasting antenna against your scalp for hours each day might cause some statistical increase in brain tumors.

    Now we're not only going to have cell-phones that carry (and must be refilled with) little cannisters of flammable fluid, but poisonous fluid that smells, looks, and tastes like some really wicked vodka.

    Would I be taking it a step too far if I added hypertension leading to heart disease from not being able to ever get out of earshot of the office?

    I think natural selection will favor those who communicate through smoke signals and hollerin'.

  • Methanol, not ethanol (Score:3)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:10PM (#1356991)
    Just to clarify for the people who don't seem to grok this: this cell runs on methanol, not ethanol. Methanol is something you ought not to drink (unless you're Kitty Dukakis, although that may have been isopropyl IIRC). It causes blindness and other effects worse than those caused by ethanol, although cirrhosis and driving fatalities might give it a run for its money.

    On the plus side, the fuel won't have to be denatured and there won't be any taxes enforced by the BATF.

  • Iridium internet (Score:3)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @04:20PM (#1356992) Journal
    I hear that the inheritors of the Iridium satellites are prototyping a DSL-rate two-way IP service to go for about $300/month.

    Just a rumor...

  • Poision (Score:3)

    by lizrd ( 69275 ) <adam@STRAWbump.us minus berry> on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:08PM (#1356993) Homepage
    OK everybody Methanol and Ethanol are different! Ethanol (CH3CH2OH) is found in your favorite beverages. Methanol (CH3OH) is a poision and causes blindness.

    What I'm curious about is what the airlines/FAA are going to say about people bringing electric devices which carry little vials of combustable poisionous liquid with them onto airplanes? Anyway food (not drink) for thought.

  • Timing (Score:3)

    by goldfish ( 75948 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:36PM (#1356994)
    I see a constant flow of stories like this; "We have a cool new technology that will revolutionise the way you do such'n'such. It'll be available in 5 years."

    What's the point?

    Technology changes very rapidly. It's entirely possible that other power sources will be tapped by then. We might all move to low power consuming devices. Motorola might decide to scrap the project.

    In short, I'd rather companies didn't come out with these press releases until they have something solid to offer, at least a "production starts next week" or similar.

    --
    bje

  • New gadgets for JamesBond (Score:3)

    by Last Warrior ( 105980 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @02:17PM (#1356995)
    Q: James, this cellphone uses a alcohol based fuel cell.
    007: Thats great Q. Will this mean that I wont have to recharge the phone between missions?
    Q: yes, but more importantly, all you have to do is ignite the antenna and throw the phone like a grenade and it will make a explosion covering a 10" radius.
    007:How about this laptop?
    Q: Explodable
    007: WEB tablet?
    Q: Explodable.. all you have to do is type in http://www.microsoft.com, count to 5, and throw it.

    LW

  • Transmeta in deep doo-doo (Score:3)

    by Wellspring ( 111524 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:25PM (#1356996)

    Silicon Valley, Slashdot News Mysterious startup Transmeta unveiled its Crusoe processor today. The new, low power processor is designed to address the chronic battery life problems facing laptop users.

    "Look, I'm tellin' ya, Captain, we need more power or the laddies will get on the plane without their data. The processors canna take anymore, captain!" said David R. Ditzel, CEO of Transmeta.

    "Well, I dunno, it sounds great," remarked Billy Carlyse, a 7-11 employee in Skokie, IL."but it'll probably be obsolete before anyone sees it. The industry trend is for rapid obsolescence-- and Transmeta has been working on this for five years!"

    As if on cue, Motorola announced a new fuel cell battery, promising unlimited power for laptops. In response, Transmeta has announced a halt to Crusoe production. They will now be doing Linux distributions and portals like everyone else.

  • Re:Three companies doing house/car/electronics cel (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @02:24PM (#1356997)
    Aha! It's about time. Fuel cells really have significant potential.

    Think about it, electric vehicles suffer from two problems: range, and recharge time. Range isn't a problem for a commuter, but since when is the only use of a car commuting? Because demand for these vehicles is so low, outside government policy, the companies must find a way to expand the reach of the battery packs.

    The second problem, really a corollary or perhaps even a cause of the first, is the fact that it takes so long to recharge a battery. I can refill my gas tank in a few minutes, but I have to leave an electric car plugged in whenever I'm not driving to keep it charged. I thought that we would see "plug in batteries," like those in the hand tools.

    Drive in to a "gas" station, unplug your battery pack, plug in a new one, and go. The station keeps a bank of them recharging at all times. This seemingly simple solution is probably not cost effective, at least with current demand on electric vehicles. So the charge time stays limited, limiting effective range, limiting demand, limiting the spread of electric cars.

    Not so for fuel cells! Fill 'em up like a gas tank, and you've got electric power. Existing stations could be used, putting methanol in the tanks instead of gasoline. No need for overnight charges, no need for battery swap stations, no need for anything but someone to make the cars.

    Let me know where I can get stock.

  • Other uses... (Score:4)

    by zor_prime ( 42665 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:52PM (#1356998)
    Has anyone noticed that this technology is coming from the same company that also invested heavily in Iridium, which was(is?) plagued by bulky and heavy handsets that have trouble sending a clear signal inside buildings?

    Instead of just making the current devices run longer, this technology might also be slated to increase the viability of technology like Iridium gaining broader customer appeal.

    After all, when you spend billions to launch a bunch of satellites, what is a few million more in fuel cell research to make the system viable?

    This same technology might also make many technologies we don't currently think of as portable, portable. Try thinking of replacing the plug, not swapping to a different battery.

    Zor

  • Throw Away? (Score:4)

    by Space Cow ( 93479 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:12PM (#1356999)
    Are these things meant to be throw away? From the sound of it, either you buy a whole new one or refill the methanol manually:

    They would use small plastic canisters similar to those used for fountain pen ink. Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.

    This would really suck! I don't want to change batteries ever. I want to plug the thing in or even better, have it recharge through solar and kinetic sources. Who wants batteries that need to be replaced all the time (expensive)!

  • Trasportation of dangerous materials (Score:4)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:19PM (#1357000)
    Fuel cells have been around for many years and it is pleasing to see them making progress in the direction of mass use but to date there has been one problem yet to be overcome. Methanol is highly volatile, highly flamable and has a low flash point. As such I'm not sure what the airlines are going to think about half the passengers in business class carrying a pint of the stuff in their laptop bags, in containers that have to go the compression and decompression each landing and take-off.

    While I look forward to being able to use this technology we are going to need to see clear evidence of the safety of the products before we will be able to travel with them.

  • Pot-powered laptops! (Score:5)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike AT mikesmithfororegon DOT com> on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:19PM (#1357001) Homepage

    Now, if the government would just let us start converting cannibis into methanol again, we could run our laptops for days off of pot.

    This might seem trite, but there's a serious side here. If Motorola &C can turn this technology into one capable of -- cheaply -- running, say, an automobile -- then demand for methanol is going to go up. WAY up. Right now we easily produce enough cellulose (in the form of corn cobs, wheat stalks, &c) to meet our present demand. Once we run cars off the stuff though, we may need to look for other supplies of cellulose...and cannibis farming will probably be the cheapest solution.

    It's pure speculation, but interesting to think about, nonne?

  • Blind Drunk: Why Methanol Makes You Blind and Mad. (Score:5)

    by ralphclark ( 11346 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @02:17PM (#1357002) Journal
    Fortunately for those of us who like a drink, the human body is quite efficient at metabolizing ethanol. The first step involves partial oxidation of the ethanol into the equivalent aldehyde ethanal (CH3CHO). This is removed by further enzymic reactions eventually culminating in carbon dioxide and water as waste products.

    As it is chemically similar to ethanol, methanol is initially acted upon by the same enzymes, partially oxidizing it to form the equivalent aldyhyde methanal (CH2O). That's the IUPAC name for it; you may be more familiar with the "trivial" name formaldehyde.

    So if you drink wood alcohol you get formaldehyde as a metabolite byproduct. Now, anyone who has done biology at school will at some point have seen preserved specimens of animal tissue floating in a jar of liquid. That liquid is formaldehyde.

    It's used for specimen preservation because it pickles animal tissue, toughening it in the process. As it's readily absorbed by (and quickly reacts with) soft tissues, it helps to preserve delicate structures that would break up in most other cheap preserving media.

    Unfortunately two notable soft tissue structures in the human body are the retina and the brain.

    So, to summarize: the reason why wood alcohol causes blindness and insanity is that the metabolic byproduct, formaldehyde, literally pickles the brain and retina. Cool, eh?

    Since the congeners present in most alcoholic beverages include a small amount of methanol, if you're a heavy enough drinker you will obtain the same tissue deterioration to some extent. Though your liver will probably pack up first. And you'll be too pissed to notice anyway.

    Cheers!

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • The wonders of fuel cells (Score:5)

    by hamjudo ( 64140 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2000 @01:26PM (#1357003) Homepage Journal
    If everything works right, the fuel cell will consume 3 oxygen molecules for every 2 molecules of methanol and it will produce 2 molecules of carbon dioxide and 2 molecules of water. It is lighter than batteries because you don't count the weight of the oxygen.

    Your laptop will produce visible steam when the humidity is high enough. Don't try to use it in a closed box, it will suffocate.

    The methanol fuel is toxic, but the by-products aren't. see the EPA's chemical summary [epa.gov] This isn't much different from batteries which are generally also toxic.

    The methanol must be very pure, or the fuel cell will stop working.

    Making methanol is a lot easier than making batteries, so it should be a lot cheaper eventually. Safe packaging and purity requirements will make it more expensive at first.

  • There are now (finally!) companies addressing all three levels of fuel-cell use.

    Ballard Power Systems (BLDP) is doing stationary fuel cells for homes, and for cars. Plug Power (PLUG) is doing cells for homes, and Manhattan Scientifics (MHTXE) is currently developing these micro-fuel cells which Motorola and others will probably be licensing.

    If you're interested in fuel cells, check out those companies, and also check out my fuel cells mailing list. Info is available on how to subscribe at http://reality.sculptors.com/lists.html

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