You can now use your laptop for an unlimited amount of time, even if you're miles away from an electricity plug. According to this article from Nature, a Californian start-up company, UltraCell Corporation, has developed a new fuel cell system for portable devices. This device, which is about the size of a paperback novel, delivers 25 watts of continuous power and weighs only 40 ounces -- about one kilogram. The only drawback is its price, currently in the tens of thousands of dollars. But this system was designed according to specifications from the U.S. Army, which might remain the only customer until prices get down to a few hundred bucks in about two years. Read more...
Here are the opening paragraphs from Nature.
If you can't bear to be away from your laptop during that camping trip to deepest Borneo, help may soon be at hand. Lightweight generators powered by methanol are now on the market... for the rich, at least.
The device, designed to specifications for the US Army by the California company UltraCell, weighs just 1.3 kilograms when fuelled up and is the size of a novel. With a supply of 500 millilitres of methanol, the cell can chuck out 45 watts for a day, which is enough to power a laptop.
Below is a picture of the Ultracell25 sitting next to a standard laptop (Credit: UltraCell Corporation).
So how does this device work?
UltraCell focused on turning methanol into hydrogen inside the device, which lets them pump out twice as much power. The difficulty is that 'reforming' methanol to hydrogen involves a chemical reaction that runs at about 280 °C.
UltraCell has managed to isolate the heat in their cell from sensitive components just centimetres away, and the whole thing is cool enough for you to put your hand on the casing.
But why did the company decide to turn methanol into hydrogen instead of directly using hydrogen? Here is the company's answer, taken from its fuel cell technology pages.
While hydrogen is an excellent fuel for fuel cells from a technical standpoint, it is an impractical fuel for portable fuel cells. On the contrary, methanol is among the simplest of all liquid fuels and the best one for fuel cells.
And Ultracell designed its own packaging technology. UltraCell’s reformed methanol fuel cell (RMFC) technology provides fuel cell power systems that are smaller and less expensive with better runtimes in comparison with direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC) systems.
Below is a diagram showing the differences between UltraCell’s RMFC and more traditional DMFC technologies.
But let's get back to Nature to get an idea of the price of such a system.
With a price tag in the tens of thousands of dollars, the army may be the only customer willing to pay for portable power just now. But William Hill, [vice-president of marketing for Ultracell,] says that it should cost mere thousands in a year's time, opening the market to emergency-rescue crews and others who spend long stints in the wilderness. Hill hopes prices will fall to hundreds of dollars as the technology improves, low enough to tempt adventurous campers.
I'm not myself a camper, but I would be more than happy to pay a few hundred dollars to be sure that my laptop is not running out of juice during a trip.
Sources: Mark Peplow, Nature, August 25, 2005; and UltraCell Corporation web sites
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6:04:18 PM
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