Portable Power Conference and Expo
September 21-23, 2003
San Francisco, CA

Developments in Small Fuel Cells

Narrow prospects for energy density improvement in batteries and the seemingly insatiable power demand in portable products continues to drive interest in small fuel cells. The conference brought first-time information from two companies that have been quiet on technical developments to date – Neah Power Systems and Ultracell Inc. – while updates to previously reported efforts were given by Motorola Labs and MTI Microfuel Cells.

Neah Power Systems’ CEO Dave Dorheim (www.neahpower.com) outlined the differentiating elements of Neah’s small fuel cell technology program – a three-dimensional 400 micron thick, porous silicon electrode, flowing electrolyte, and on-board oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The 3-D porous Si is expected to provide more active catalyst sites than typical carbon-based membranes. In addition, flowing electrolyte (as opposed to having it static) eliminates the methanol crossover problem. Carrying the oxidant onboard gives up the weight savings of using oxygen from the air, but the resulting closed system eliminates the very troublesome water management problem, and confers the battery-like advantage of being able to operate in all kinds of environments without concern about contaminants, whether air-borne or liquid. With this approach, Neah believes they can still get a two-to-three-time improvement over standard Li-ion battery runtime. The company recently received a $2 million Advanced Technology Program (ATP) award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The technical strategy for small fuel cell development at Ultracell, Inc. was explained by CEO James Kaschmitter. Fuel reforming is the design path and MEMs is the enabling technology. Ultracell’s assessment is that unlocking the high energy density of methanol (MeOH) by converting it to hydrogen via steam reforming avoids the major problems of direct methanol, such as crossover, water management, low efficiency. They believe that the technical problems they face with steam reforming of methanol (e.g., CO generation, high temperatures, expensive catalyst costs) have a much better chance of being resolved. Ultracell’s strategy is to press MEMs technology and silicon fabrication to make a fuel processor chip that can deliver high purity hydrogen to conventional fuel cells at low cost and high efficiency. The core technology comes through Ultracell’s exclusive license arrangement with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Alan Soucy, COO of MTI MicroFuel Cells, provided an update on their commercialization efforts, including their partnership with Gillette to develop fuel cartridges and a working arrangement with Intermec on power for portable devices. MTI is pursuing a direct methanol fuel cell.

Motorola Labs has been examining both reformed and direct methanol fuel cells. They have built working models of both in an effort to get a practical handle on the advantages and problems associated with each approach and continue to report on the status of their work at various trade conferences.

BIC Corp. is looking at how to leverage its mature network for fuel cell opportunities. They say that consumers’ main experience with fuel cells will be through interaction with the replacement cartridge. They feel they can bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to this aspect of consumer fuel cell commercialization.

Power Management

What makes power management difficult is that most piecemeal solutions have been applied and now a top-down holistic design approach that incorporates power management in the architecture of the device is necessary. There is opportunity for improvement but also significant difficulty in executing the full array of options. These include processors designed specifically for optimal energy use, dynamic voltage and frequency management, reducing the number of voltages in the system to a minimum, integrated synchronous buck regulators, lowest voltage devices available, shutting down circuits not being used, smart batteries with accurate fuel gauging and low power displays. A breakdown of energy usage shows that 33% goes to the display (with 75% of that backlighting), 10% to the CPU and 10% to the power supply. The PC Extended Battery Life Working Group, started in October 2002 (www.eblwg.org), has four focus areas: usage model research, suppliers’ recommendations, alternative power and power management.

Portable Product Developments

Traveling with a portable computer is great. All of your files are at your disposal, you have the ability to do all of your regular work and communicate via email while away from the office. However, the portable falls short when you are traveling and need to access one piece of information quickly and the computer is closed or in your briefcase. Putting a second very small screen on the lid of the computer or providing a wireless connection to the portable with a PDA device is a feature being explored to overcome this deficiency.

With all the interest in wireless connections, developers are asking how useful will wireless be if you can’t also cut the wire to AC power.

Intersil is the main supplier of WiFi chipsets. Mobile Internet use for most of the world is below 10% of users, but in Korea and Japan the number is about 80%.

Postage-stamp-size SD cards are becoming the flash memory de facto standard. Introduced at 64MB, next year they will be at 1 Gigabyte with a theoretical 16GB potential and 160MB/sec transfer speed.

How Users Really Feel About Today’s Power Sources, a 60-page marketing study by Bob Altabet (Raltabet@cs.com), offers a peek into portable computer owners’ usage. Some facts from the study to think about – a portable computer is run on batteries 19% of the time, 20% of users own an extra battery, 46% do not know what kind of battery they have, 29% are dissatisfied with runtime. You can draw your own conclusions.

[Editor’s Note: Dennis Sieminski (dennissieminski@

msn.com), a frequent meeting reporter for ABT, has relocated from Atlanta, where he had worked for AER Energy Resources, to southern California, where he now is in international sales for Noran Engineering.]