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Posted by Ablang on 09/30/48 11:25
Better Battery Life for Your Digicam, MP3 Player?
Purdue scientists develop hydrogen-powered fuel cell technology to
drive portable electronic devices.
Lesley K. McCullough, Medill News Service
Monday, August 29, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Electronic devices like MP3 players and laptop computers
may become dramatically more portable thanks to engineers from Purdue
University, Indiana, who today unveiled a new method of using fuel
cells, powered by hydrogen instead of methanol, to automatically
recharge batteries.
Fuel cells could enable portable devices to run longer before needing
to recharge. Although manufacturers have been developing direct
methanol fuel cell (DMFC)technology, that approach has a few
drawbacks, including low power density and the need for a catalyst to
ignite the reaction between the methanol, air, and water to produce
electrical power, which then gives off carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
Hydrogen fuel cells can provide more energy than their methanol
counterparts, but a key problem has always been hydrogen storage. It
is not possible to use high-pressure hydrogen gas containers or liquid
hydrogen in portable electronic devices.
Now, Purdue researchers Evgeny Shafirovich, Victor Diakov, and Arvind
Varma have found a solution to the problem of storing and generating
hydrogen to drive fuel cell power systems in portable electronic
devices.
How It Works
Purdue's new hydrogen-producing technique uses the chemical compound
sodium borohydride, a gel created by combining water with
polyacrylamide and tiny aluminum particles, plus a combination of two
known methods for producing hydrogen. One method, developed during
World War II by Purdue chemist and Nobel laureate Herbert C. Brown
(who discovered sodium borohydride), requires expensive catalysts to
produce hydrogen; the other method ignites aluminum in water to
produce hydrogen.
"Our solution is to combine both methods by using what we call a
triple borohydride-metal-water mixture, which does not require a
catalyst and has a high enough hydrogen yield to make the method
promising for fuel cell applications," Varma says. "So far we have
shown in experiments that we can convert 6.7 percent of the mixture to
hydrogen, which means that for every 100 grams of mixture we can
produce nearly 7 grams of hydrogen, and that yield is already better
than alternative methods on the market."
Shafirovich says that with further study, the research team expects
the conversion yield to increase to around 8 to 10 percent.
Another benefit of the new method, Shafirovich says, is that its
byproducts are benign and recyclable--hydrogen is nontoxic and very
safe.
What It Means to You
Here's how Shafirovich and his colleagues envision their invention's
real-world application.
Consumers would install the fuel cells as small credit-card-size
cartridges. The fuel cell would contain pellets of hydrogen-storing
mixture, as well as an ignition system and a microprocessor. When a
battery's energy level deteriorated, the microprocessor would initiate
the combustion of a pellet, generating hydrogen to power the fuel
cell. That would provide energy to recharge the battery. Once all the
pellets on a cartridge had been consumed, a new cartridge would need
to be inserted.
While it is hard to say exactly how many portable electronic devices
exist worldwide, conservative estimates put the number at more than 1
billion. These fuel cells could eliminate the need to plug in notebook
computers and could power not only portable DVD players, PDAs, and
digital cameras, but also defibrillators, infusion pumps, and handheld
medical diagnostic devices, for example. Of course, for this type of
system to work, the portable consumer electronics devices would have
to be redesigned.
Shafirovich says the military could also benefit "because soldiers
need power for many electronic devices and it's hard to find plugs in
the battlefield." And he added that the technology could also be used
to power devices used by NASA to power electronic hardware in space.
Next Step
Although the group has filed a provisional patent application,
Shafirovich says that in order to complete basic research over the
next two years, the researchers need $600,000 to improve their current
technology. They hope to build a demonstration unit to showcase their
integrated hydrogen-powered fuel cell system.
The university is also looking for private investors to take the
research to the marketplace. According to Karen White, a technology
licensing manager in the office of Technology Commercialization at the
Purdue Research Foundation, they are still in the very early stages of
making that happen.
"We are currently soliciting interest from those in the industry to
take it from the academic arena into the real world of research and
development within the industry," she said.
So when will hydrogen-powered fuel cell technology reach consumers?
"It depends on how successful we are at raising funds and if investors
are interested in our product," Shafirovich says. "I don't know about
one year, but everything moves very fast in the electronics industry,
so it's probably safe to say sometime in the near future."
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122326,tk,dn082905X,00.asp
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"In a world where more than 10 million americans live with cancer -- we believe unity is strength, knowledge is power, and attitude is everything!"
-- Livestrong, by Lance Armstrong
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