In like 2010 there were pocket size fuel cells on the market. What happened to that? What happened to the Biolite thingie that turned heat into electricity for charging your phone? Nowadays everyone just uses folding solar panels and power banks for portable power. It's OP and sure I guess it's practical, but too simple and boring. I would buy a micro RTG if the government would let me. I want some true scifi shit, not a black rectangle and a battery. What are my options?
steam engine
More seriously, you could try to PrepHole a Stirling. Dunno how much temp diff you'd need to make any amount of useful power, but I managed to run an LED by leaving the hot cylinder in the sun.
My pistons were pretty shit though so you should be able to get more.
I did this. Works ok. Just barely enough to charge my phone or power bank, but that's all I wanted it for. Runs on candles
I looked into all types of stuff years ago when researching off grid power. Lads are building sterling engines as generators but the problem is that they are massive and require a hell if of a lot of precise engineering above what you can slap together in the average home workshop.
Channel linked has a wealth of information on old style power generation and storage solutions from the 19th and early 20th century. It's very small scale experiments and proof of concept stuff but interesting nonetheless.
Forgot link
https://m.youtube.com/@RobertMurraySmith
I've seen a company that builds sterling generators on commission with iirc an open source-ish design
Why recharge when you could just not run out of power for 10 years
Don't those deliver miniscule amps?
Yeah, on the order of 100uA when new, less as it ages.
They do last about 20 years though.
how many of those would I need to fly a drone for 10 years
They can power a clock that's about it, so you would need about 800 to power a drone.
I once thought a homemade rtg might be able to get you about 300 watts of power. Large one with a Stirling engine. Bunker backup power. Just isn't worth it. Better off putting the money in the battery bank.
I wonder if ~20 of them could power a little fan and scoot a mini dirigible around
>300 to power a drone
I think you dropped a few zeros.
Each one of them puts out ~100uA, at 1.6V, which is 160uW.
It would take 6250 of them to generate 1W of power.
I can’t find any information on how much they weight, but 6250 of them is going to weight in the tens of kilograms, too much to lift with just one watt of power.
Also, they cost $5k/ea, so have fun paying for that.
You can convert your truck to wood burning
Biolite is still around. I use one as my campstove for hiking because it’s small enough for my needs and burns pretty hot just for using twigs, plus I don’t have to pack in fuel and pack out empties like a moron. I upgraded the size of its battery cell too and now it holds more charge than a stock Biolite.
>In like 2010 there were pocket size fuel cells on the market. What happened to that?
Mainly that they sucked.
I almost bought one, but didn't because after reading the specs, it turns out it was only about to produce about ~200mA@5v, which was just barely enough for phones at the time to charge from.
Phones today probably wouldn't accept such low power output.
The capacity wasn't great either. IIRC, a full HydroStick only held like 4-5Wh.
For comparison, most phones these days have a 10-15Wh battery, so you'd need 2-3 of those hydrogen canisters to get a full charge.
Why charge your phone when there is a cell phone tower within 15 min of walking distance for it to have a usable signal?
With 5g, they’ll be even closer!
I don't know but I've frequently wished that my phone could run on butane. I got this idea because I got a butane powered soldering iron and it kicks ass compared to corded ones. Imagine just filling your phone up from a butane canister in 20 seconds and then having a week's worth of gas in there. Batteries fricking suck and I blame the liberals for making me have batteries in everything. Electricity in general is pretty gay. I wish we had never invented batteries so we would've been forced to invent a way to convert butane efficiently into electricity without moving parts. Imagine if all of your battery-powered objects had the qualities of a gas powered car as opposed to an electric car. Your butane drill would run all day and be super light. And you could also have tankless butane appliances that wire directly into the wall. Most houses already have gas connections for the stove and heating, it would've been cool if rather than having electrical outlets all over the house, there were small butane ports in all the walls with a connector that looked like a coax. Then you'd plug in your appliances by screwing a thin tube into the socket and a stream of butane would come through and power your coffee machine and air conditioner. If we did this we could have much more powerful appliances than today because the power throughput of the butane tube would be orders of magnitude higher than 2000W or whatever you can get from an electrical outlet. And we would never have problems with the grid like we do now when too many people run their air conditioners at once.
Safety? Not a problem, you could have breakers in the house that detect the butane flow from each port and shut it down if it detects too much coming out indicating a leak. The outlets themselves would also not dispense butane unless the cables were screwed in correctly. And houses would obviously just have extra ventilation built in to deal with the CO.
A beautiful dream
Butane is a bastard gas. Why would you want to use a sooty gas when you could harvest the power of clean burning propane?
But seriously, notice bright yellow flame of a butane lighter? Ever wonder why it's so bright and yellow?
Propane.
A butane lighter is yellow because it's designed to burn incompletely because the larger and cooler flame is desirable for cigarette lighting applications. You can easily get a blue flame with butane if you add more air. You can also get a sooty yellow flame from propane if you block the air mixture holes.
I have a few ebike batteries I want to turn into power sources. Anyone know how to do that?
Set fire to them and use it to super heat steam for your turbines.
i had a similar plan to do that for when all my fish died,
pretty much a pipedream, but the idea was that
the amines and high water content and stuff would make for the most dense vapor,
apart form maybe shark or whale,
and that if they first were kept in a decomposing vessel with like a depressurizing antechamber, to gather as much nitrogenous atmosphere as possible while decaying, after some time they might become close enough to ammonia to oxidize to nitrous oxide,
and put that in the turbine,
or maybe just as a general fuel source
goldfish are pretty cheap and breedable, so
in the long run it could work out cheaper than conventional fuels
You need an inverter that matches the output voltage of the batteries.
here in north greenland i use a 10sqft peltier device warmed by a pack of huskies and cooled by the snow
Maybe 20 years ago I ran across a website that focused on early electrical appliances that were developed prior to widespread installation of electrical service- about 25- 30 years ending around 1910 or so- and how technology was developed to power them using things like treadmills and pedals and water flow through plumbing systems to drive small generators.
The hydropower thing is interesting because even though the potential for lots of output is limited, the energy is there and is mostly wasted.
It evidently worked well enough to bridge that gap before outlets existed, at least in short bursts, and that was at a time when electrical devices (and storage batteries) were at their least efficient.
It's mostly a novelty but you can get LED lights that run off of the flow from a faucet via a small turbine built into a screw-on part not much bigger than a normal aerator. Some of them are temperature sensitive and color code the output that way, which is actually useful.
You can also get electronically controlled faucets that generate their owm power for those controls that way, and they have them in touch free motion detector toilet flush valves too.
A single faucet won't make much power but something in line coming into a building could run every time there was any flow, and between toilets and washing machines and dishwashers and sprinkler systems there's more potential than meets the eye, especially if you were to use that kind of turbine as part of a pressure regulation scheme
>Some of them are temperature sensitive and color code the output
Not necessary, you can hear the difference between cold and hot water.
?t=39
Here's my list:
>ionising radiation capture (a vacuum chamber with a beta emitter in the middle, and a wire connected to both the emitter and the chamber)
>radio energy capture (tank circuit and 4-diode rectenna)
>atmospheric potential generation (a kite with a conductive wire, plus an electrostatic motor)
>sonic/vibratory (an array of spring-loaded transducers of different weights to target different frequencies)
>thermal (solar thermal hot water heater + sky radiative paint water cooler with a heat engine between)
>chemical (take the brine output of a reverse osmisis setup and generate some energy back again from osmotic pressure as you send it back into the sea)
>lightning (go to the African Rift Valley or that one place in South America and build a big tower and massive capacitor bank)
Cool ideas here, gave me some topics to read up on. Ty
> i want to frick that unicorn
I saw a TV show about post-apocalypse survival where they made a wood gassifier and piped the wood gas to a modified gas weed whacker with a generator cobbled on it. The whacker burned the wood gas to run and power the generator.
I was looking into biolite style generators that turn anything combustible into electricity. That got me onto alcohol fuels
Turns out is is very easy to heat wood, cardboard, scrap paper etc, and the wood alcohol gets steamed off, and you condense it into a liquid. There are some videos on YT of people making crude DIY wood alcohol distillers outdoors, for camping or survival situations. Looks pretty easy.
The good thing is that this wood alcohol is interchangeable with propane, so you can use it in a biofuel generator for electricity generation.
Wood and cardboard and paper is free and abundant, might be a good option. I'm keen on ideas for a DIY biolite style heater or stove that can be used for heating cooking and charging my phone all at the same time.
radiation capture
Never heard of that method, found nothing on google could you point me to some more info I wonder how much power you could create with legal beta emitters.
Those are moronic I wonder what they are practically used for.
Yes their most powerful one is 100 microwatts
But their power output goes down by 50% every 12,5 years
That's correct, just for fun I calculated how many you need to charge your phone.
You need 31250 to get 5w (the minimum for the phone to accept charging) and it would take about 4 hours.
And if you only had 1 you could still charge your phone if you bypass all the electronics in the phone and directly hook it up to the battery then it would take about 31 years (I included the power drop).
So yeah pretty useless a small solar panel would be so much better.
Listen, op asked a stupid question, he got a stupid answer.
As others have hinted. The long development time of portable hydrogen meant that by the time they were released portable power banks were smaller, safer and far cheaper. Originally those portable hydrogen cells were supposed to put out more power. They were saying about powering laptops. But they couldn't do what they said and ran out of money as people bought Anker powerbanks.
This company was nuked years ago. You can buy a smaller version of this machine for campfires, some people also made DIY version for cabin stoves.
Everything that isn't shit will be instantly available at industrial or retail level. It is not therefore worth wasting time on what does not exist already as proven supported turnkey equipment.
This is hard for the unstudied to accept. They think a thing exotic if they've not seen it before.
Just crank your own electricity, bro
Those vent holes are so hopeful, kind of cute..
It's Chinese engineering. They may well actually be necessary.
I'm getting more and more interested in home power via hydrogen cells and photovoltaic electrolysis if they can bring the perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell to market, even with them degrading over a decade the price and ease of manufacture might make it work.
Picea looks promising to potentially frick over power companies.
It is just too inefficient. Also no matter what fuel cell you use there is a loss, then you got to pump it to pressure (another loss) then convert it back (another loss). The efficiency is just not there. You could make a large lifepo battery pack for cheaper with a cycle life that will outlast your fuel cell.
Do you mean hydrogen for a vehicle, or for home energy storage when the sun isn't out? If the latter, it's kinda stupidly inefficient. You'd be better off making a diy flow battery, if you'd be making anything at all. Vanadium is the standard method, but I've seen promising designs using iron, where some of the energy is stored as iron metal instead of all in the solution. So it isn't quite as scaleable, but you can likely design it sufficiently flexible for home storage needs. Iron is a lot cheaper than vanadium.
It's also probably pretty doable to make a molten metal battery yourself, one of those ones that uses a low-melt salt between the two molten electrodes, like Ambri's designs. You may even be able to use NaK and galinstan as the two metals if you can find the right electrolyte to sit between them:
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/a-non-toxic-room-temperature-liquid-metal-battery/
Build a series of conducting coils in geostationary orbit around the Earth.
Launch a big ass magnet through the inside of the coils in the opposite direction of orbit.
Transmit power back to Earth by firing a laser at a kettle full of water that turns to steam and spins a turbine.
You realize the magnet loses its momentum when it gets converted into electricity right?
MY CAR GETS 40 RODS TO THE HOGS HEAD AND THATS THE WAY I LIKES IT
How about water droplet energy generation. They claim they can get 140v 50w m2
>50W/m^2
lol no
Even at 100% efficiency, if there's ever that much water coming down at once, you have way bigger problems than power generation. 50W of falling water at the high end of average speed for a raindrop would require about 800g of water per second. I'm not sure rain falls that heavily even during flash flood conditions.
50mW would be much more believable, but it's basically useless at that point. 5 minutes minutes on a hand-cranked generator would get you as much power as a full 24 hours of a square meter's heavy rainfall.
A frickhuge solar vortex engine. It's an artificial tornado you can hook up some turbines and generators to.