Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work? | Hacker News Reader

Bloom Box: What is it and how does it work?

csmonitor.com

6 pointschanux8 comments

From the linked article:

>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.

So you feed in fuel and oxygen and it outputs electricity. Wow!?!

How do they get away with claiming there are no emissions if you're using fossil fuel to power it? As presented here it smacks of fraud.

probably not fraud, just a stupid reporter. from this and the other article it's pretty clear that this is some kind of catalysed oxidation. it's effectively "burning" the fuel in a way that efficiently generates electricity, which is neat, but means that carbon dioxide will be one of the byproducts (and this was mentioned in the earlier article). so that part of the article ("no emissions") is simply wrong (note that it's not a direct quote - it's background from the journalist, who was probably copying from info on a hydrogen fuel cell, not understanding that hydrocarbon fuelled cells burn carbon and so generate carbon dioxide).

Horribly bad reporting. Again, the "no emissions" claim, a claim that seems to originate entirely in the mind of the reporters, because Boom is not making this claim. "Low emissions" yes. All fuel cells produce emissions. Just less than combustion for the same energy output.

It almost feels like it should be a hoax. The Bloom Box appears to be genius and has massive funding and backing, but the web site is so cryptic and it has come out of no where, I keep thinking someone is going to say "gotcha" at any moment.

That's my default position on something like this. I'm waiting for someone who knows what they're talking about to say "yeah, this does what it says on the tin."

The "(fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) " section strikes me as odd ... how on earth can you power a fuel cell with solar power?

In what way is this better than or different from micro-CHP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_power)?

This is about as fact-free as the original TV puff piece. The slashdot discussion yesterday produced more informative comments; e.g. this one is worth reading: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1559256&cid...

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