Laptop Methanol Fuel Cells Promised This Week

securitas writes: "Wired tells us that Germany's Smart Fuel Cell is about to ship the first methanol based fuel cells for laptops and other electronic devices. The company says a 120 milliliter fuel cell can power a 15W notebook for 10 hours, and you can refill it without shutting down."

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Infrastructure

[adamjone]

The infrastructure for methanol will have to be vastly improved before a methanol fuel cell battery will ever be successful in laptops. I work as an integrator, and I take my laptop on-site for a lot of the jobs that I do. Most days on-site I work for 10 hours or longer on a system, carrying my laptop from place to place. The batteries drain, but my two batteries usually have the life to last through the day. When I get back to the hotel at night, I can plug into any outlet to fuel up the batteries.

With the methanol fuel cell, I would need to carry extra charges with me. On a week long trip out of state, that can be a lot of charges. With the current security measures in place at most airports, I doubt that I would be able to take them on the aircraft. Now I need to rely on the local shops to carry the fuel cell cartridges, which may or may not happen, depending upon my location.

Also, if I'm staying in a hotel, charging my batteries is free. If I use the fuel cell, I could get charged $3 per day or more for using my laptop. That's not much if I can write it off as a business expense, but if it is for my two week vacation to Alaska, it can get fairly expensive.

I prefer the convenience of using chemical batteries. I can charge from anywhere, and in a lot of cases, for free.

Hydrogen on a plane

[JohnPM]

"There is no way hydrogen is ever going to be allowed aboard an airplane," Stefener said.

I think this is an overly dismissive statement. Methanol itself is really just a hydrogen storage method. You throw in some carbon to stabilise the hydrogen and as a result, you produce carbon dioxide when the fuel is used up.

There's a lot of work going on to find non-chemical storage methods for hydrogen, such as sponges or matrices that would be explosion-proof. There's no reason to believe that this won't eventually succeed in a safer and more efficient fiel cell than methanol based ones. It will just take longer.

Recharging

[0123456789]

Hmm, the big drawback that I can see is the cost (article quotes $3-5) and equally importantly convenience of refilling the fuel cell.

Good luck to them though.

Re:Hydrogen on a plane

[leuk_he]

The only reason methanol(the stuff that makes you go blind) is (will be?) allowed on a airplaine is because the tax free shops sell a lot of alcohol(the stuff that makes you go silly). And lets just asume a bottle of >40% whiskey has the same chemical properties as 100% bottle of methanol.

This will all end when a big plane crash and high % alcohol drink go in the same heading on a newspage.

It is not allowed now to use any electronic device during start or landing. Why? Just in case probably. It is never allowed to use any device that uses an antenna? why? maybe because they can not tell if it is receiving (mostly harmless) or sending (interfering with cockpit/flight controls).

As security will become more important less and less bagage will be allwod in the passenger area. hydogen or methanol will be less of an issue.

Image a refill of either fuel onboard an airplane. or worse, a refill in an airplane where smoking is allowed. Or worse (in a few years), a refill of a taiwan produced laptop that has been dropped a few times.

also see: [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/science/02/01/02/1534252.sht ml

Methanol eh?

[TenPin22]

I'm no chemist but that sounds explosive and as such unlikely to be alowed in planes. I can just imagine faulty cells blowing laptops to bits. I can see the fuel cells having a very prominent disclaimer.

I know that batteries like Lithium cells are epxlosive if their contents come into contact with water but as these fuel cells are refilable they must be far less safe.

10 hours is not much

[joshv]

I can reliable get 5-6 hours with my extended life battery on my vaio under heavy usage. Under typical usage it would go 10 hours.

If battery usage were really an issue with most laptop users, manufacturers could easily hit the 10 hour mark with more efficient/dimmer backlights and underclocked processors (no one needs 1GHz in a laptop anyway).

The problem is that its a rare laptop user that isn't far from an outlet. Sure, some people want to take a jaunt down to the beach to work on The Great American Novel for 10 hours - but those people are hardly enough to provide a strong market for fuel cells in laptops.

-josh

Re:Infrastructure

[benbob]

a lot of people seem to be missing the point on this one - maybe i'm wrong - but it seems to me that the most exciting aspect of this emerging technology is the fact that it is green! plugging into an existing electrical outlet may seem convenient and clean but how much carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere to produce those watts? As for comments about how it is free to charge your laptop in your hotel room i'm sure that the hotelier has adjusted their per night rate accordingly ;) On the point about battery life, i doubt very much that 2 chemical batteries would have lasted for a 10 hour day even as recently as 5 years ago and would feel pretty confident that in the not too distant future fuel cells will be able to outperform, outlive and outlast chemical batteries. As far as infrastructure is concerned, i'm not! (concerned that is!) hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and if i can expand on an idea from an earlier posting, instead of farting into the battery why not piss into it instead? or refill from any of the countless other sources of hydrogen? (shit! I hope i'm not sounding like a hippie?)

Problems with methanol

[Shillo]

The problem with methanol is that it's highly poisonous. This means that it can't be cheap to produce (because you need extra safety measures in the factory) and it can't be cheap to distribute (your tamperproof containers must be *really* tamperproof).

Or you can switch to cheap, mass-produced methanol dispensers that occasionally kill their users.

IMHO, it's a good idea to wait for hydrogen fuel cells. First, hydrogen is environmentally safe, and can be stored in such a way that it won't be flammable nor explosive (at least not more so than alchohol is). Second, you can produce it from water, meaning it's probably practical to build a rechargable hydrogen cell. You'd recharge it from the wall socket and a glass of water.

--

Re:Problems with methanol

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the article ?

Methanol is 33 cent a gallon and reaaly mass produced. And guess what, available in any hardware store, burning alcohol that's it, cheaper than dirt.

Outlets?

[Ozan]

Wouldn't it be more practical to equip passenger seats in planes with outlets? Or where else you can't find one?

Re:Flight safety(security and breathing)?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Ten hours should be plenty for any flight
What about long haul flights OZ/NZ to Europe for example..

>The other problem is that planes are closed environments. Just as you can't smoke on a plane
You could smoke on planes up until fairly recently and a lot of european flight still cater for smokers, smoking is banned for passive smoking reasons. When smoking was allowed the air was replaced something like every couple of minutes, these days companies that ban smoking get away with replacing the air every couple of hours thus saving fuel and as a result money. There is a belief among many that this reduction in air quality is responsible for the increasing number of air rage cases.

Re:About 20-30% efficiency

[andykuan]

1 KWh goes for around a dime where I live. So at 0.15 KWh from 120ml of methanol (based on your calculations), the equivalent power-utility provided electricity would cost 1.5 cents. If we assume the methanol goes for about a dollar a gallon, then 120ml (roughly 1/24th of a gallon) would cost 4 cents. That comes out to about a quarter per KWh if you use the methanol fuel cell. That's pretty similar to solar costs.

Hmmm. That's too bad. I was envisioning a massive refitting of the world's power delivery infrastructure.

Re:Flamable?

[markmoss]

I believe this is something we can blame on the Romans -- somehow or other they created two very similar prefixes, one meaning "not" and the other meaning "very". So as they carried over into English, they are quite confusing:

Inflammable = capable of burning very much
Inadmissible = not admissible

"Flammable" wasn't originally a word in English, but in the era of lawsuits and warning signs about obvious dangers, marking a gasoline tank as "inflammable" left the possibility of being misunderstood as "not flame-able". Or that the lawyers representing the estate of some idiot that lit a cigarette while standing next to the gas tank would claim in court that he read it that way... So the word "flammable" was coined. No english-speaker is likely to misunderstand that -- and now (in the US at least), they mark the things in Spanish too. (This just makes me wonder about the French-Canadians, Swedes, and Finns up here, or the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. in California -- is there room enough for warning messages in every language?)

Re:Possible, and an old dream...

[aslagle]

Elementary chemistry (and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) strikes again!

The energy to break the molecular bonds in H20 is always going to exceed the energy released in the reaction of Hydrogen and Oxygen to form water.

Yes, the first reaction is endothermic, and the second is exothermic, but you're never going to get out more than you put in.

Banned from airlines?

[tuxlove]

What do you wanna bet that fuel cell-powered laptops will be banned from airlines because of their volatility and possible use as a weapon? 120 ml of methanol is enough to start a reasonable sized fire, or perhaps even enough to be used in some sort of explosive device. That would be kind of ironic, because long flights are when you'd most want the longevity provided by a fuel cell.

Re:Infrastructure

[Medievalist]

/.
Good points, proving that the technology won't be for everyone until the local chemist shop (drugstore or druggist to us Norte Americanos) starts carrying methanol cartridges.

But hey, not everybody can get inkjet packs either - yet inkjets are still eminently marketable.

At 33 cents a gallon USD, vendors can easily put a 1000% markup on the refill cartridges. That prospect should quickly take care of the infrastructure problem in capitalist markets! Eventually, you might see business-class hotels keeping methanol on hand in the same way they stock coffee and toothpaste.
--Charlie

Re:Infrastructure

[PhotoGuy]

Also, if I'm staying in a hotel, charging my batteries is free. If I use the fuel cell, I could get charged $3 per day or more for using my laptop. That's not much if I can write it off as a business expense, but if it is for my two week vacation to Alaska, it can get fairly expensive.

I don't know how you're getting to Alaska, or where you're staying when you're there, but I'm guessing $3/day is paltry as compared to other expenses.

(Unless you're driving from Whitehorse and staying in a tent, that is...)

Seriously, though, $3 as a starting point isn't too bad, and it will only drop. Don't forget that those $300 batteries you buy for your laptop don't last forever; if you ran them from full charge to empty 100 times, I'm sure they'd have a good portion of their useful life used up. I'm assuming fuel cells will have a far longer duty cycle, as long as more fuel is supplied.

I had a Dell, less than 6 months old, whose two expensive batteries are now useless. Maybe a manufacturing defect, but try convincing Dell of that.

-me

Re:Flamable? [sic]

[n6mod]

This, of course highlights the stupidity of current FAA regs on what can be carried aboard aircraft these days. Leaving aside the possiblity that I'll have an easier time hijacking a plane by beating people with my shoes than threatening them with a nail clipper...

Lighters (and likely these methanol cartridges) are banned on board. Yet I can carry my Lithium-Ion powered Magnesium laptop on board. Have you ever seen a Magnesium fire? Right, but it's hard to light. Now, have you ever seen a Lithium fire? Do you know what happens when you short a Li-Ion battery? (Heck some Apple, and I think IBM Li-Ions didn't even need to be shorted)

So we're all allowed to something that approximates a thermite grenade, but they're worried about nail files. [sigh]

Bruce Schneier was right [counterpane.com]. It's not about security, it's about the appearance of security to convince the sheeple to fly.