|
A Fuel Cell in Your Phone
By David Voss
Former Editor Science Magazine
Tired of short-lived batteries? Methanol-powered micro fuel
cells are racing toward market, promising up to 20 hours of
cell-phone talk time. In a Los Alamos, New Mexico, industrial
park not far from the laboratory birthplace of the atomic
bomb, Robert Hockaday sits in the cluttered lab of his startup
company, Manhattan Scientifics, holding a business-card-sized
patch of clear plastic. Closer inspection shows a circuit-board-like
pattern of black platinum and ruthenium printed on either
side. The contraption is the innards of a 5-centimeter-by-13-centimeter
power plant that generates its own electricity using methanol
as fuel. It may not look like much at first glance, but it's
one member of a new class of tiny power packs that is ready
to explode onto the market – and that just might annihilate
one of the world's most ubiquitous technologies, the battery.
These
miniature power plants, called micro fuel cells, promise a
huge power boost for portable electronics ranging from cell
phones to laptop computers to future generations of power-hungry,
Web-enabled handheld devices. Today's best lithium-ion cell-phone
batteries provide an average of only four hours of talk time;
micro fuel cells could provide up to 20 hours of talk time.
And after that, instead of plugging in the cell phone overnight,
or swapping batteries, you'd just snap in a new methanol cartridge.
Fuel
cells are already bursting onto the market in other forms
and in far bigger sizes. Buses powered by fuel cells are making
their first appearances, and cars are next. Fuel cells that
provide backup power for homes and offices are becoming available,
too. Electrolux has even prototyped a cordless fuel-cell vacuum
cleaner. Among other advantages, fuel cells use readily available
sources of energy – namely, hydrogen or methanol –
and produce only water, carbon dioxide and heat as waste products.
Now, industry is gearing up to make fuel cells small enough
for consumer electronics. Building practical fuel cells this
small – devices that produce one-tenth of a watt to 50
watts – presents huge engineering and materials challenges,
but the market opportunity is enormous. "Portable fuel
cells have the real potential of being profitable in a shorter
time span than either stationary or automotive fuel-cell applications,"
says Atakan Ozbek, vice president for energy research at Allied
Business Intelligence, a technology research firm in Oyster
Bay, New York. "In five years this could be potentially
a billion-dollar-a-year market. This industry is going to
kick." Not surprisingly, a race to commercialize the
technology is in full swing and includes everyone from Motorola
and Korean electronics giant Samsung to startup companies
like Hockaday's. The competitors are betting on different
designs and even slightly different chemistries, but they
share a common goal: taking a bite out of the $6 billion world
market for rechargeable batteries.
The first successful application is likely to be methanol
fuel cells that produce approximately one-tenth of a watt
and can recharge conventional batteries, liberating consumers
from the dashboard lighter or the wall socket. Next will be
fuel cells small enough to actually fit in the battery compartments
of existing phones and yet powerful enough – one watt
for cell phones, 50 watts for laptop computers – to be
used for direct power.
Even farther on the horizon, microchips will be directly powered
by built-in fuel cells. These fuel cells will provide a boon
to miniaturization by removing the need for separate power
sources. They'll be custom designed to provide precise power
needs. And production costs should drop when both chip and
power source are fabricated as one unit. Self-powered chips,
in turn, could enable a future generation of self-sufficient
gadgets, like tiny networked sensors that can operate in remote
areas, detecting pollutants, biowarfare toxins or anything
else that needs detecting, and sending out the data for months.
Getting
Small
1
>
>
>
|
