My next laptop will be powered by a jet engine (possibly)

[jdhurst]

In the Toronto Star today:
Alan Epstein, Professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT has run his laptop on a minature turbine for 3 hours. He thinks that a minature turbine the size of a laptop battery would run a laptop for 15 to 30 hours. He and 20 colleagues have created and tested the minature wafers that make of the compressor, combustion chamber, turbine and generator. They don't have the wafers working as one unit yet. The engine exhaust is very hot (1200 degrees C) and the technology is expensive, so he sees 20 year transpiring before any possible commercial use.

Still, a laptop that could run for 30 hours on one charge is certainly on my radar screen.

... JD Hurst

[christopher_wolf]

I saw a paper on these at a conference I was at here a few years ago. They are certainly very interesting as a form of portable, high-density power plants, but they do have their technical downsides. MIT, and LBNL at one point, were working on this for awhile.

One of them, as you noted, was the exhaust temperature. For the engines to be thermodynamically efficient, they have to have either a significant difference in the inlet and outlet temperatures, large pressure differentials, or move a very large amount of air. Very large pressure differentials and even larger amounts of air being moved are out of the question given the size and material constraints. So the only real path left is working with the temperatures, in which one has a greater range that can be attained with the microturbines. Now they just have to figure out how to increase the mechanical efficiency so they can get away with, at least, a small reduction in the temperature difference.

I commend you on planning to keep your current Thinkpad for at least 20 years.

[tfflivemb2]

Wow, wonder what they would ask about for as a fan control utility to minimize noise on that thing.

[mattbiernat]

how about making laptops just more energy efficieny and runing them on regular batteries? also making more functional and less demanding software.

[carbon_unit]

That would be the best plan. Good luck getting software and hardware companies to agree with you.

[jdhurst]

Battery technology is very, very old. I mean raw cells still produce 1.5 volts (approximately), cells begin to deteriorate instantly on first use, and most importantly, no one has yet devised a battery that will last a decent amount of time (8 hours or more on one charge with screen on, hard drive running, wireless running, and standard CPU usage the whole time). ... JD Hurst

[pianowizard]

Well, my T43's fan already sounds like a jet engine!

[egibbs]

Hmmm...

I've used lots of computers powered by jet engines - usually through the aircraft's generators and power conditioners, and a 400/60Hz converter if the machine couldn't handle aircraft power.

The first was an HP 9825 mounted on an instrumentation pallet on a USAF aircraft.

Ed Gibbs