The Future Is NOW

Photos by Max S. Gerber

AS OUR ATMOSPHERE CHOKES on greenhouse gases and the planet’s thermostat inches up toward the danger zone, it sounds at first like a horrible idea: What if, in addition to the fossil-fuel combustors in our cars, we also put them in our computers and in all our other digital devices, from cell phones and PDAs to cameras and pagers? A hydrocarbon generator on every desktop and in every briefcase — that is the vision of a small coterie of engineers and materials scientists who believe that within the next decade we will begin to see this dream materialize. And they do mean dream, not nightmare. For despite hydrocarbons’ bad rap, they are a brilliant source of power and could potentially solve one of the major problems of our increasingly digital lifestyles without endangering the environment.

One recent morning I saw this bizarre coupling of the chemical and the electronic in action when Zongping Shao, a young Chinese scientist at Caltech, hooked up his MP3 player to a tiny generator running on propane. At 3 a.m. that morning, Shao had finally gotten the device working and, along with his supervising professor, Dr. Sossina Haile, I was the first to witness this radical new technology at work.

Almost unbelievably simple in appearance, Shao’s experimental apparatus was enclosed in the tip of a test tube with tiny plastic hoses running in and out to ferry the air and propane in and to release the exhaust fumes. But there the similarity to any conventional generator ceased. For a start, there were no moving parts and hence no mechanical noise. At the heart of Shao’s setup was a disc the size of a penny made of an amazing new material he has developed. By catalyzing a chemical reaction, this material will take the energy stored in a hydrocarbon — like propane or octane — and convert it into electricity. What he has made, in effect, is an exotic kind of fuel cell, of the solid oxide variety, that is far more powerful and practical than the hydrogen-based fuel cells we have been hearing so much about from George W. Bush and our own Governator.

After showing me the disc itself — a pale-gray wafer that looked not unlike a piece of asbestos — Shao sealed it within the test tube and hooked up the propane hoses. Minutes later he attached the MP3 player to the wires trailing out the bottom and handed me the earphones so I could hear the future for myself. Let it be known that the first sounds ever to be micropowered by fossil fuel were a selection of syrupy Chinese pop songs.

Haile, a professor in Caltech’s Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, believes that within a decade we could begin to see small-scale generators powered by hydrocarbon fuels providing the energy for our laptop computers — thereby replacing the heavy and limiting batteries we currently rely on. Dr. Paul Ronney of the University of Southern California is working on another approach to micropower generation, using tiny combustion chambers. Eventually, he says, even our tiniest electronic devices could be powered by hydrocarbons. Though there

are a lot of technical hurdles to be overcome in terms of miniaturizing this technology, Ronney’s lab at USC’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering is already working on a device just 3 millimeters across. Fuel would be provided in the form of cartridges, much like those in a Bic lighter, that you’d simply plug into the side of any electronic equipment.

USC’s Paul Ronney, below, is building combustion engines the size of a dime. Here, he holds a plastic version under development.

But aren’t we supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels? The U.S. has still not signed the Kyoto Protocol, making us the only major holdout, while the rest of the world is taking global warming seriously. So what’s with this push to make even more hydrocarbon burners? Actually, says Ronney, this is not another case of belligerent American exceptionalism — digital devices require so little power that even if all our electronic helpers were powered by fossil fuels, the total amount of greenhouse gas produced would be utterly insignificant compared to what we generate by driving our cars and by heating and air-conditioning our homes and offices.

As anyone knows who has ever experienced their cell phone running out of juice at a crucial moment, batteries have a limited lifetime before they must be recharged. Moreover, they are heavy, typically accounting for around a quarter of the weight of a laptop. Imagine, then, the battery hell of the average U.S. soldier, who is now freighted down with a GPS locator, laser-guided gun sights, electronic night-vision goggles and an ever-expanding array of battery-dependent paraphernalia.

Warfare is not going away anytime soon; thus the Army clearly needs a better way of providing the soldier of the future with power. Looking ahead, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced in 1998 a major initiative in micropower research. The agency has spent $20 million to $30 million on its micropower program so far, and around the nation there are half a dozen teams working on the problem, including a group at MIT that is leading an effort to build a microscale gas turbine engine, and a team at UC Berkeley that is trying to make a tiny Wankel rotary engine — a scaled-down version of the one used in the Mazda RX-7 and RX-8. Ronney and Haile, however, are taking a radically different approach: Rather than scaling down existing technologies, they are trying to develop a whole new micropower system.