Finally we can all sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that Sony has created a prototype fuel cell system that fits in the palm of your hand. The combination lithium-polymer battery, backup battery, and control circuit are destined for future mobile devices. According to a company engineer, "We have been aiming to mount (a fuel-cell system) in mobile devices and finally reached a level of commercial design." The tiny power-pack uses methanol as a fuel and controls supply with a hybrid pump, which allows it to regulate the amount of power used based on a system's needs. The company claims that just 10ml of methanol can power a mobile device through 14 hours of 1seg movie watching. Sure, it sounds good on paper, but does this mean soon we'll have to visit tiny, methanol refilling stations manned by a team of mice in jumpsuits? Probably not.
posted May 4th 2008 11:20AM
Now thats the future of laptop batteries atleast!
Can't wait for fuel cells to take over :)
Can it power a DS so it can play doom?
(sorry needed to be said, dont flame me!)
No, it didn't need to be said.
Consider your self flamed.
Hehe, we've been using Methonal to power RC models for ages.
I don't know if I should think that this is a great change or not. Wonder if my fuel for my RC cars would get cheaper? :D
Great... more 'meth' labs...
Cool! What the MPG?
Cool! Almost limitless renewable energy powering our mobile gadgets!
(If they use bio-methanol)
bio fuels are not limitless. Quite the opposite. They compete with things like ...er, food, for growing space. They are no replacement for solar and other renewables. Nor are they 'green'. This is junk science.
Solar uses up space, too. But corn-based ethanol is the stupidest idea for a fuel source, ever. Soybean-based biodiesel at least produces significantly more energy than is put into making it, but ideally biofuels should be made using waste material and specialized crops on marginal land unsuitable for growing food.
So stupid! This is a step backwards as far as I'm concerned, and converting more farmland away from food production, and more towards energy production is not going to help food costs. And how the heck would you charge the stupid thing? You'd have to buy fuel for it, which seems far less convenient than simply plugging it into a wall. I think that hydrogen fuel cells are much more advantageous in this respect: They don't use biofuels, they can simply be plugged in to be recharged, and they're clean energy assuming that the power supplied through your wall outlet is clean energy. No nasty byproducts either like battery acid.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please!
Hydrogen fuel cells need to be recharged with... hydrogen. Last time I checked power outlets don't usually supply hydrogen either.
Woa there.
What I simply meant was that the means to produce such a fuel was made via plants, which are grown. The last time I checked, that's pretty much the definition of a renewable energy source: "any naturally occurring, theoretically inexhaustible source of energy, as biomass, solar, wind, tidal, wave, and hydroelectric power, that is not derived from fossil or nuclear fuel."
I'm talking from a realistic point of view here. Sure you'd be taking some land away from farming, but guess what? You wouldn't be relying on oil companies to serve you your daily amount of tectonic byproduct!
Solar power?????? Seriously? You don't get much more solar than plants! They use the sun's energy to produce sugar, which we can refine into certain fuels (be it bio-diesel or ethanol or methanol; pick the one which has the most theoretical output of course). And while the plants are growing, they absorb the carbon being outputted from the machines that burn their fuel!
And as for hydrogen, while it may be the most abundant element in the universe, almost none of it exists naturally on Earth. Practically all of it is chemically combined with other elements (e.g. H2O). Guess where they get the hydrogen from? Water. Guess how they do it? They use electricity to separate Hydrogen from Oxygen. Due to the chemical makeup of water, you get about twice as much hydrogen as oxygen from the process, but it takes energy to separate them. And guess where that energy comes from? Fossil fuels.
I don't disagree with everything. I do agree that it would be awesome to put these plots on land unsuitable for food production. And use some of the methane from waste sites to help fertilize the plants.
I hope this clears some things up.
I'm sure you won't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong.
Hydrogen fuel cells can be designed to convert water into hydrogen themselves, thus becoming "recharged" which would, of course, take energy from an outlet to do. You wouldn't need to actually purchase hydrogen to charge your phone or laptop. You might have to top it off with water on occasion, which is handily available at your faucet.
These biofuel solutions, as you state, are at best, carbon-neutral. This is, obviously, better than fossil fuel burning, but its not really feasible at all to clear cut enough forest on the planet to power our needs. You'd be destroying a huge chunk of biodiversity.
With hydrogen fuel cells, presently they would not be carbon neutral, since most places are powered by some form of fossil fuels, however the technology, to me, seems a bit more advanced, less crude, and has the ability, with the development of more clean energy sources, to have no carbon footprint at all.
I watched an interesting article on wind power a week or two ago, and from what I saw, it would be a much more feasible option than biofuels as a fix for the oil addiction.
Hydrogen's energy density sucks. Remember, it's a gas while methanol is a liquid. Liquid methanol at ambient conditions has about 3 times the energy density of hydrogen, and that's with hydrogen stored at around 10,000 psi. I would like to see the "charger" for a hydrogen fuel cell phone that electrolyzes water to produce hydrogen, then pressurizes it to 10,000 psi! Crazy.
By the way, cow dung has a higher energy density than hydrogen. If you don't like methanol, I propose you run your phone off of crap as the more feasible alternative to hydrogen.
Yes very good Sony.
Just one question though - are they going to be of a similar quality to those laptop batteries you supplied?
lol,
never has a simple comment like that made me laugh so hard.
thanks
wow, you really are a retard.
Wow,I honestly was gonna say something just like that.
But seriously,do we have an answer bout that yet?Cause I personally don't want to put one of those in my psp and have my hand,or more importantly,my pants blow up.
Heheheh gotta love all those flammable liquids in your pocket :)
That'll be so convenient...i can keep the methanol dispenser right next to the bread box...since i'll be making a trip there every 14 hours
Wow, cool. Just waiting for my house to catch on fire
Why got an Xbox360?
Wow Jake, trying hard much?
Dave is hurt by your comment jake.
Jay is commenting on Dave's comment about you Jake.
Hrmm.... I'd much rather squirt in a bit more juice than find an outlet and tether myself to it for 2 hours!
Just so long as said juice is cheap :)
Dude, Sony don't do anything cheap.
I'm well aware of that, and that's why I wouldn't buy the sony premium methanol when regular plain old methanol is just as good...
Like most things you can get a cheap 3rd party alternative instead.
A quick google found me a 500ml bottle for £4, less in bulk!
Try finding chemical batteries that provide 50 charges for under a fiver, that's sounding like a pretty darn good deal!
i love squirting juice
Why are companies focusing on making fuel cells smaller instead of on making the fuel extraction process more efficient and economical? Obviously, because they're not trying to make a working fuel cell-driven infrastructure; they're just trying to score points with the easily-impressed green crowd.
Until Hydrogen/Methanol/whatever extraction and processing becomes more economical than oil/coal/natural gas, fuel cells will never take off. Excepting, of course, the inevitable brain-dead government legislation that will try and shove the inefficient infrastructure down our throats before it's ready.
@Josh
bcause fuel cells will be able to run out of hydrogen... You can get it just by adding water and plugging a very simple machine at home...
@nick
The "very simple machine" you're talking about is show, inefficient, and extremely power-consumptive. An electrolysis machine (which is what I assume you are talking about) only has a practical efficiency of maybe 45%.
My point is still valid: we don't need advances in fuel cell technology. Fuel cells have been around for decades and their technology is firmly established and efficient enough for daily use. What we NEED is for someone to develop an electrocatalyst or bioengineered hydrogen-producing microbe or some such in order to facilitate the H2 we will need to support an economy.
@nick
But doesn't this "conversion" need energy to work? No matter what you're losing energy into this conversion (see laws of thermodynamics)... and that in itself would defeat the purpose.
I think it's better to have this tech out first and then focus on efficiency since electronics nowadays are outstripping power supply in current batteries.
Hey everybody. Yes, including you, Sony, working on that smaller fuel cell for devices and you over there-- What's your name? Apple? Ok. Yes, Josh L. has decided that everyone must now become fuel producers. DO NOT work on a way to make cheaper fuel cells for the mass consumer market. DO NOT figure out how to set up assembly lines for fuel cells.
We must all spend 100% of our time figuring out how produce the fuel and then we can all spend several years putting together the assemblies that can utilize that fuel. Everyone must work on exactly the same project because obviously thousands of companies cannot be allowed to concentrate on their own individual expertise. We can only concentrate on one thing at a time. You-- Stop working on that cure for cancer. We're working on fuel extraction today.
@ GenericWhiteGuy:
Point taken. However, I still have to wonder at companies who are developing better fuel cells when there is nothing to put in them yet. They are banking, I suppose, on somebody, somewhere, at some point in the foreseeable future perfecting a scalable, economic fuel generation solution.
Or, as I said before, they're just spending this money as a roundabout marketing strategy to make themselves appear "green" and "eco-friendly" and "forward-thinking" to people who are easily swayed by feel-good buzzwords.
I'm sure there is some marketing strategy behind this to appear more "green", but battery capacity is a big issue for all their portable products. This device uses extrememly small amounts of fuel to produce what would take several charge cycles of power output.
Sure, you won't be powering a car with this and it doesn't solve any of the numerous environmental or political issues involved with energy production. But, it does solve an issue of making portable devices more useful. It will cost more to buy a few milliliters of ethanol, but the purpose of this is to create a longer-lasting power source. Looking at all the liquor stores around here, I don't think there is a shortage of ethanol production for this small scale.
There's no mention in the linked article about "green energy" or "infrastructure changes". This is about a device that uses a fuel cell to power a battery that can then be integrated into existing portable electronics. I'd be very happy to give up vodka to power my laptop for 8 hours at a time.
Nonsense, fuel cells are great for this purpose: energy-dense and easily refilled. The cost of the fuel would be trivial if the price of a bottle of rubbing alcohol is any indication. Of course, it would be a bigger deal for a car, which uses much more energy.
and in other news... food prices keep rising, because of man insatiable need for fuel...
This is a bad solution. Go solar or nuclear. otherwise, we are facing one crisis or the other.
I'd rather have expensive food than cheap glow in the dark food. Nuclear energy is possibly the most dangerous\damaging\expensive method of power generation in existence.
"Nuclear energy is possibly the most dangerous\damaging\expensive method of power generation in existence."
No, that would be coal.
Batteries or Ultra Capacitors are still the future. We can't keep using crops for creating the fuel for fuel cells as food prices are skyrocketing because of the biofuel industry...
seeing the sky-rocketing food prices worries me and for our future generation
arc reactors are the future. we just need tony to whip us up a stark industries plant
Damn, I was about to say the same (just watched "Iron Man" last night, awesome movie!).
Again with this discussion?
You would need around 3 L of fuel a year to power a device like this.
On a car, however, that would be enough to drive for around 30 km, which is less than most people drive everyday.
So basically your car uses in a day what your phone will use in a year.
Yes but my phone isn't a 2 tonne mass of metal requiring kinetic energy to move it. I would be worried if a phone used more than that in a year. Personally this isn't the answer, especially with the combustibility factor.
I'm holding out for the 1mm cubed nuclear micropile.
id be good with a mr. fusion
Which is precisely why we need to get off of fossil fuels entirely right now. Stop burning things, tear down coal plants, and build nuclear plants immediately. Once the energy supply is green, who cares how long it takes to electrolyze water?
25 years of spent nuclear fuel isn't a challenge to handle at all. And then we can switch everything over to solar. Fusion a few decades later.
That was supposed to be a reply to JoshL above. Stupid comment system... When I hit reply, I frakking MEAN reply.
I imagine the people who are going to end up paying for the expense of electrolyzing it will care. (This would be the consumer. ie. You and me.)
It doesn't matter how "green" the power generating infrastructure is; switching to nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, or anything else isn't going to make the electrolysis process any more efficient. Trying to mass-produce H2 using the current inefficient methods would put tremendous strain on the power grid. Rolling brownouts are still rolling brownouts even if the power you're (not) getting is generated with "green" methods.
you do realize that some bacteria actually produce methanol naturally. its the reason why it occurs naturally in the environment...
lets not convince anything that ends with an "thanol" with a fossil fuel, just for future reference..
wow... i still cant wait till nanotechnology gets ahead! Anyways, anybody want to invest in a methanol station with me?
Something like fill your car up and charge your cellphone all in 1 place! Maybe we can offer free wifi and coffee.
Sony is know for its advances in miniaturizing many of our daily gadgets... Now they have miniaturized our ability to turn methane into CO2 and warm the planet while Nero plays on out mp3 player...
Fuel cells do not work this way!
Please do a little research before opening your mouth next time...
Seeing as how CO2 levels lag behind the temperature, I would say you sir are a retard. try reading up on the subject before being like every other climate crisis asshat and spouting off what Al Gore tells you to.
An Inconvienent Truth is just a really long episode of "I'm super serial guys, we HAVE to stop manbearpig!"
you sir...are an idiot
It’s just another distraction. Why not go with a petrol fuel cell, they can charge more for the fuel (tongue-in-cheek). Oil is renewable. Better still-A permanent magnet can run electricity forever. Why doesn’t someone (who can protect themselves against assassination) just do something with Tesla technology or water power, so we can all get on with life. It’s the corporations that are making the money on this and more profits, rather than supplying a worthy, green and permanent solution. They are just shuffling the deckchairs.
Yay! Because nothing sound more appealing than a FUEL TANK in my pocket, as close to my skin as possible.
er- "sounds"
I was paralyzed with fear of `splosions and forget an "s".
Just like every smoker lives in constant fear of the fuel tank *cough* I mean lighter they carry right? right??
Yeah, didn't think so...
People have become such pussies about certain things, I would not be surprised some that comment here would actually be afraid to have a lighter in their pocket, both because they fear catching fire AND fear their government would not approve..
I have to wonder, where does the CO2/H2O go? Is there some sort of condensation/storage unit in the tiny little thing? Or does it vent hot steam into my pocket?
Yes, it vents hot steam straight into your pocket. It also injects you with poison every 15 minutes.
Thanks for answering my question Nigel, you've been very helpful.
Cow-sh*t put to good use: power your mobile gadget with it!!
Cows? Think "people" as in "my battery is dying, hold on while I......".
dude, if you poop methane, you're an alien...
I heard about (human) urine batteries.
methanol, not methane
"...does this mean soon we'll have to visit tiny, methanol refilling stations manned by a team of mice in jumpsuits?..."
LMAO! Loved that one! =D
these are all valid questions, but the one we really need to be asking is.... will it blend?
correction, these are all valid questions except the one you just asked
1. Nuclear plants solve the oil addiction in3 or 4 years (they are not build overnight, you know) but what to do then with the nuclear waste in 100 years? It's bread for today, hunger for tomorrow, as happened with oil 100 years ago.
2. Food prices are now being pumped up because China and India increase of consumption, not because of oil only (an increase on the price of oil, affects everything, because all goods need to be transported and even goods are made from oil, such as plastic, drugs, etc.).
3. 14 hours, lets say, 8 hours for real, with 10 ml of methanol, it's pure awesomeness. For those non metric, do a quick google and find out how much alcohol is. A shot of vodka has enough alcohol to feed the thing for 16 hours.
4. The methanol is renewable, no matter what. We just need to find out a way to produce it more efficiently and with less land usage, machines, etc. but we need a start. Without a real problem, there are no real solutions.
5. Cheap H2 is the future, but far future. We must get real, not idealistic.
Easy, just use it as fuel. If it's radioactive, there's still energy that can be obtained from it. Decent reactor designs can "burn" anything.
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/8/8c/400px-CANDU_fuel_cycles.jpg
Most methanol is currently produced from natural gas. I like the energy dense power supply, and the refillable without plugging in thing, but I have concerns.
First, the thing emits steam, so you probably wouldn't want it in yor pocket.
Second, unlike ethanol, methanol is extremely toxic. Its what makes you blind when you drink moonshine which wasn't prepared properly.
As little as 2mL can kill you, and long term exposure to methanol vapor is not a good thing.
Methanol, being a very small molecule, is readily absorbed through the skin. Vapors are readily absorbed through the lungs.
Not a good thing to spill when refilling, for instance.
There is no way on God's green earth that this thing will be approved for widespread use. However, if it is, the Lawyers will have a field day.
wonder if this could power iron man's suit?
cool
The best part about a DMFC: no recharge time!
Just pop in another 50th-percentile-IQ-proof canister of methanol and the thing just keeps purring away.
Funny... by some of the posts here, I think some people are worried they'd be carrying a steam engine around in their pocket.
So fearful of the unknown/misunderstood.
I can see the day when airlines, in the USA at least, require all passengers to remain unconscious from check-in time until they find themselves on a baggage carousel. So, forget taking methanol on board!
It's curious... cars going for electricity as main energy source and cell phones going for fuel hehe
"There is no way on God's green earth that this thing will be approved for widespread use." Funny you should say that. The Department of Transportation just approved the transport of up to 750 ml of methanol in fuel cell cartridges on commercial aircraft, by regular old passengers. So, I can climb on my plane with nearly a liter of nasty, but no toenail clippers. I'm not saying it's a great idea, but you would be surprised what the industry is getting established as permissible material on planes. The really funny part is that they approved methanol cartridges up to 250 ml in volume, but the TSA prohibits me from bringing more than 100 ml of toothpaste on-board. Go figure.
Most of these direct methanol fuel cells use heavily diluted methanol (mostly water)
So dilute, in fact, that as a poster above notes, refill cartridges have already been approved to be carried on aircraft.
You'll probably have to buy the refills, instead of rolling your own with straight methanol, but the refills won't poison you or be an ignition hazard.
Nice, the Hinden-battery to be accompanied by the Hinden-charger.
"Soon to be exploding in Dell laptops at a conference near you!"
Still a great idea, I just want to see some better Hydrogen generating processes, especially considering the ones I've read about take a great deal of water, and that's not so great in desert regions. Maybe a mobile plant that can relocate to flooding regions? Nice.