Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work? / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

[archerships]

So what is Bloom Box?

It’s a collection of fuel cells – skinny batteries – that use oxygen and fuel to create electricity with no emissions.

Fuel cells are the building blocks of the Bloom Box. They’re made of sand that is baked into diskette-sized ceramic squares and painted with green and black ink. Each fuel cell has the potential to power one light bulb. The fuel cells are stacked into brick-sized towers sandwiched with metal alloy plates.

The fuel cell stacks are housed in a refrigerator-sized unit – the Bloom Box. Oxygen is drawn into one side of the unit, and fuel (fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) is fed into the other side. The two combine within the cell and produce a chemical reaction that creates energy with no burning, no combustion, and no power lines.

About 64 stacks of fuel cells could power a small business like a Starbucks franchise, according to Sridhar’s 60 Minutes interview.

Working with an investment of around $400 million, aerospace engineer K.R. Sridhar spent close to a decade inventing the Bloom Box. It grew, he explained to 60 Minutes, from a device he originally invented to produce oxygen on Mars. When NASA scrapped the Mars mission, Sridhar reversed his Mars machine, pumping oxygen in, instead of making oxygen, he said.

Sridhar already has some 20 well-known customers, including Google, FedEx, Walmart, Staples, and Ebay. The corporate boxes cost about $700,000 to $800,000.

via csmonitor.com

The lack of details is pinging my crank meter, but they have some smart backers, so I'm withholding judgment until they debut their full website.

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[cramer.livejournal.com]

It sounds like the sort of nonsense that spews from a marketing department. "No emissions" is a lie -- even a fusion reactor has "emissions" (namely helium, but it remains contained.) Feeding "solar power"?? WTF? Powering a battery with... a battery?

It sounds like nothing more than a HUGE stack of "off the shelf" fuel cells. To produce the power being claimed (and lets be honest, light bulbs come is a wide range of wattages), it's still going to take a goodly heap of FUEL. Sitting one of these in your backyard isn't going to magically pull electricity from the air.

Fuel cells are very neat and highly efficient, but they aren't "free energy". They need fuel -- typically hydrogen.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something similar. Any energy source that has inputs also has outputs, unless you're somehow getting energy out of a black hole. If you react hydrocarbons with oxygen, then at best you get pure CO2 and H2O, but you'll probably get some CO and other annoying byproducts as well. Maybe the CO2 can be produced in some form that's relatively easy to sequester, compared with combustion engines - but it's still an emission of a sort.

[visgoth.livejournal.com]

From the sounds of things, any breakthrough is in the production of the cells themselves, in that they are far cheaper to make than other fuel cell technologies.

[visgoth.livejournal.com]

I've seen another source that says the boxes produce CO2, but can't seem to find it now. I'm guessing the "no emissions" hype refers to sequestration or something along those lines.