Say farewell to dead batteries
Don’t you just hate it when your laptop or cell phone’s battery runs out and you have to scramble to find a wall outlet to save your work or continue your call? Soon, you may no longer have to worry, thanks to the chemical engineers of Purdue University. At the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society today, those fine folks announced that they have developed a means by which the batteries we rely upon so much can be automatically recharged.
In their design, a credit card-sized cartridge containing hydrogen-releasing pellets would drive a fuel cell that provides charge to batteries as they are depleted. The pellets consist of compounds that produce hydrogen when reacted with water; a computer chip can monitor how many of these pellets have been used up in a cartridge and signal when a replacement is needed. Best of all, these cartridges are not only extremely portable but disposable as well; the byproducts of the reactions utilized are environmentally friendly, so used-up cartridges can easily be discarded or recycled.
Besides the obvious application in portable devices for everyone from investment bankers to Marines, the inventors mention that their device may also be considered as safe energy source for hardware in future space vehicles. Evgeny Shafirovich, a scientist who worked on the project, states:
“The Apollo 13 accident was caused by an explosion involving liquid oxygen, which is needed along with liquid hydrogen to feed a fuel cell in spacecraft. Use of chemical mixtures, such as ours, for generation of hydrogen and oxygen would eliminate the possibility of such an explosion.”
And, of course, any technology than can spare NASA further problems is a good thing.
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