Development
Current research focuses on cost reduction using reactions without odor or fumes. One heat source in development uses air-activation reactions that utilize oxidation of common metals like iron or zinc. Another uses solid fuel energy storage technology. The heating element contains aluminum and silica, two benign materials, which in an intimately mixed powdered state can undergo a chemical reaction to give off a large amount of heat. The small heater unit is formulated to give high utilization of the chemical energy content and generates 720 calories of heat per gram. To view a demonstration of the aluminum/silica self-heating "Self-Heating Coffee Demonstration" on YouTube Neither technology is commercially available.
Read more about this topic: Self-heating Food Packaging, Heating Methods
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
“The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)