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Samsung Working On Fuel-Cell Powered Cell Phones
An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek reports that Samsung plans to build prototype phones that will be powered by Direct Methanol Fuel Cells." From the article: "The deal also marks a huge vote of confidence in a little-known company. MTI Micro, which had sales of $8 million in 2005, is one of a handful of outfits seeking to bring hydrogen-based fuel-cell technology into more common use. Its Mobion fuel cells have already appeared in industrial handhelds from companies like Intermec, a unit of Unova, and have drawn the attention of military contractors developing devices that soldiers will use in the field. Under the deal, which lasts through the end of the second quarter of 2007, the two companies will jointly research the use of methanol-based fuel-cell technologies for use in cell phones. Any patents that come as the result of the research will be assigned to MTI."
Now I can keep talking while getting a tan, and not worry about the batteries running out. Goodbye geekdom on a cellphone, hello tanning while on a cell phone. I'll be doing the world good too - I'll be saving energy!
Would it be backed by zippo?
From the article
"What Soucy and MTI CEO Peng Lim envision is a world where instead of recharging your phone's battery, you'll buy disposable fuel cells that last longer than the batteries that come with cell phones today and are more eco-friendly. Exactly how much longer they'll last the company won't say yet. "We've promised to demonstrate a fuel cell that is better than a lithium ion battery by the third quarter of this year, and we're on track to do that," Lim says."
Hahahahah. So people are going to give up being able to recharge their cell phone batteries for free for the ultra-convienence of having to go to the store to buy new fuel cells for their phones everytime they lose power. Right.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
it's only a matter of time before we have methane-powered fuel-cells. It would finally give a purpose to the three years of farts i've stored in my attic. Unfortunately for my attic, we'll have to wait.
A Cell fueled Cell phone using the Cell processor.
That would be cool!
how long until
Aside from the typical 'good luck trying to get your methanol powered mobile or laptop into a plane', how long have been fuel cells in development?
They're the Duke Nukem Forever of the batteries!
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I don't need the heat of a xeon in my pocket. Oh wait, this is a cellphone? Whatever. Still applies.
My karma makes buddha cry.
I have a solar charger for my mobile phone and it works just fine. I am cheap and like the thought of free energy to power the black hole of money that is my phone. I applaud the expansion of alternative energy technology into our daily lives, but wonder if this is the best application for fuel cells...
Now you can get brain cancer and methanol poisoning at the same time! :)
Seriously, how do you recharge these things, with a can of pressurized methanol? Talk about a fire hazard! Or maybe the fuel cell is disposable and you just slap in a new one? That's not environmentally friendly. Maybe you send them back to the factory and they can refill them? Will there be a grey market in refills such as with Ink Jet/Laser Toner Cartridges? Will those refills be safe? Can you carry them on an airplane since flammable items like this are not allowed today? What do they do with the excess heat from the fuel cell operation? There are a LOT of questions to be answered both from the technology side and the business logistics side before you are going to see these in production for consumers. Meanwhile traditional battery technology is not standing still, we get more power density than ever now For the military which does not have to follow the same precautions it could be a good thing for field use, but I don't see them being comsumer devices ever.
What are the safety issues of carrying around a hydrogen/methanol cartridge in a warm pocket, leaving it in a hot car, and other abuses suffered by our current phones? Additionally, as water is usually a waste product of fuel cells, are we all going to have to explain away the spreading damp patches on our trousers more than usual?
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...is can I power my CAR with them?
I stopped my cell phone service because of the price of gas, I simply can't afford to talk and drive at the same time, or any other time for that matter.
Maybe I'll just buy a bunch of these phones, take out the fuel cells and then call up the Mythbusters guys to 'trick my ride.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Great, another new idea for technology that won't get shipped to anyone but us Americans because it can be turned into an IED. That's what I want for Christmas, a volitile explosive compound inside of an electrical device next to my HEAD!
I'm getting kind of tired of my old coal powered cell phone.
..would be dandy. Just imagine, in the off-licence:
"No darling, it's not for me, it's for my 'phone!"
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
...phone nuts will now be able to talk incessantly about their mother's bout of constipation, their lack of a love life, how crappy their company is, and so on, extending the suffering I must endure on the train. And I hear JetBlue is thinking of addign wireless access to their planes, so you could use them in flight. Brilliant!
I'll just nip off and shoot meself...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
One word: Enema
in the toxicity stakes.
That is, the petrol (gasoline, for the North Americans) is, to a first approximation, just as toxic as methanol. When was the last time you heard of someone suffering from petrol poisoning, in any non-trivial (meaning, fixed with 5 minutes of fresh air) manner?
The reason methanol seems more dangerous is that if you contaminate beverages with it, you don't notice it's there until you've consumes a lot. Pure methanol doesn't have that problem. (On the downside, it is absorbed through the skin, so that's not good. Still, when was the last time you got petrol on your hands, in other than a trivial fashion?).
In summary, yes, it's unpleasant. But, in the opinion of this chemist, no more unpleasant that a large number of other substances that we manage to handle quite safely. Just don't drink it.
On battery density - forget it. Battery energy density is on a negative exponential decay - there's just a limit to how much energy you can have in there, and we're at something like 85% of that, IIRC. Power density is improving, but it's better life that you really want, which is energy density. Everyone I know that does reaserch into batteries (that's about 30 people over 7 labs) basically thinks that batteries are more or less as good as they get - there's maybe another 5-10% improvement in energy density, but that's about it.
It would be rather big and smelly but, people wouldn't talk on it in the car more then once.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Hey, they did make a hydrogen car by hooking the business end of a hydrogen tank hose directly into the carbureator of an unmodified diesel sedan... No fabricating at all, they just kinda stuck the hose in there till it worked. Er, and exploded in a giant fireball...
I remember reading about Nokia working on this kind of batteries years & years back. Anyways I'm not impressed before they find a way to power cellphones with point singularities :)
Play the devil's advocate, far and away from our modern mentality of technological post-human embracement: Fuel cells will make power virtually incorruptable. A [nearly]living, breathing unit of self-sustaining power! Unharnassed by man and only regulated by circuitry. A terryfing revelation, if spun out of our reach. As it stands at least we have the option of "pulling" the proverbial plug on technology should it advanced beyond us. Should we take this step? [I realize how paranoid this sounds, and do not endorse any radically way of living, just food for thought!]
I was looking forward to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (10+ years from now), but didn't think much of it until I read about Honda's new hydrogen fuel cell. It puts out 100KW of power!
It's incredible to me that a fuel cell that is smaller than a common household gas generator puts out 20 times as much power.
You could power your entire neighborhood with one of these in a power outage.
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All right, a mentholated cell phone.. .Now my phone and my Newports have the same minty taste!!!
"But this one goes to 11!"
Both Toyota and Honda have made fully-functional fuel cell cars. They said 5 years ago they might have a limited production model in 10 years.
y /fuelcell_hybrid.html
http://www.toyota.com/about/environment/technolog
I wouldn't be shocked if others have made similiar prototypes.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I stopped my cell phone service because of the price of gas, I simply can't afford to talk and drive at the same time, or any other time for that matter.
STFU, Please. I'm sick of the morons on the street who tell me that they're going to have to choose between "gas and food" because of the price of gas rising. Gas is about a dollar a gallon more today that it was 12-18 months ago. Let's just say for the sake of arguement that your fuel prices are now 50% higher than they were a year ago. Are you really telling me that the average of about 50 dollars a month more we're paying in gas prices has put such a crimp in your budget that you had to drop cell service? Not to say that cell service is needed but people who live in that narrow of a budget probably shouldn't have a cell phone anyway.
What's best is the "gas or food" morons who tell me their woes as they're chain smoking... Their 150 dollar a month habit (a pack a day at local prices) doesn't have anything to do with their financial dire straights?
Most people piss away money on crap but cry when the price of a needed good goes up. It's simply stupid.
Does this mean that the new fuel cell, in close proximity to the already methane-enriched colon, will catalyze the phenomena of spontaneous combustion?
Will this aid in our societal cessation of tobacco smoking, a fetish enjoyed by yours truly?
Spending Resources on Defense leaves Less to defend.
Just as an aside, methanol is what model airplanes use for fuel, and it is also used in the process of turning waste vegetable oil into biodiesel. As for safety, how hard can it be to come up with a safe way to transfer 6 oz of liquid from one container to another?
When buying methanol, like most things, the more you buy the cheaper it is. Keeping a 5 gallon container around and then filling your phone or a small syringe from that doesn't seem too difficult a proposition.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Tsk, tsk -- apparently contrary opinions aren't allowed? Good thought about the cave though, as long as it has Internet access. I can just imagine calling Comcast and ordering service...
I'm sick of people bitching about things other people do that cause no harm to others whatsoever. If somebody talking on a cell phone bothers you more than somebody talking to the person across the isle from you on a train (which is damned noisy to begin with, so it's not like they're making it much worse), you have serious issues.
Then why do you read Slashdot? Actually I'm sick of other people bitching about my bitching. Free country, what? Anywho, anybody talking loudly on the train annoys me, as much as anyone with their iPod cranked so high I can hear stuff leaking from their earbuds, and people with offensive body odor. Perhaps it's not doing me physical harm, but since I am pretty much trapped, being I have a long commute on crowded trains, is it it too much to ask for people to be courteous, keep the conversation short and quiet, and give others a chance at some peace? I guess so, according to your view. You are no doubt not on Emily Post's Christmas card list.
And I say that as somebody that doesn't yak on his cell phone in public.
Well, perhaps you have a higher tolerance for this kind of crap than I do, and you are cetainly entitled to your opinion, but my suggestion is that society is hard enough to deal with given the amount of technology that is causing people to be alienated from one another, isolated in their own little worlds, without having to deal with overt rudeness. Personal conversations belong in personal space and don't have to be at the highest volumen possible if they are to be conducted in public.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
FTFA:
What Soucy and MTI CEO Peng Lim envision is a world where instead of recharging your phone's battery, you'll buy disposable fuel cells that last longer than the batteries that come with cell phones today and are more eco-friendly.
I'm not sure exactly how this is supposed to be more eco-friendly. A disposable cartridge system rather than a rechargeable battery? OK, maybe fuel cells can get a somewhat higher fuel efficiency than centralized generation and transmission to individual buildings. But then take into account the energy it takes to make the special enclosure for the cartridges, then to pump them full of methanol. This would need to happen for each cartridge. Plus, carbon-based fuels get more expensive and the power companies start relying more on wind/solar technologies, this tech will still need to use 100% carbon fuel to run at all. Just 'cause it says `fuel cell' does not mean it is `eco-friendly.'
I want an ethanol-fueled PDA-cell-phone-combination with integral hip flask. Just unscrew the antenna and imbibe. Thash not a swizzle stick, Ofisher, thash my stylus!
The difference is that when you unplug them, one of them will be recharged, the other will require you to buy more stuff before you can use your laptop without plugging it in again.
With a fuel cell, you have to pay the fuel bill. With recharging from mains power, you have to pay the light bill at each location where you plan on recharging.
Ok, so if I read TFA correctly, what we're really talking about here amounts to a battery with a different type of chemistry and slightly more complex internal structure. I don't see a promise of easy home re-use and re-charge necessarily in the TFA. In fact, it indicates the potential market for "...as many as 80 million fuel-cell cartridges" by 2012.
Seems to me, that "fuel-cell cartridges" == batteries for all intents and purposes. Given that, the issues that will need to be raised are the same as those of batteries now. Will they be made in standard sizes, or will we have to pay a premium for the model used by each manufacturer? Compare this to ink-jet printer cartridges. They all pretty much do the same thing. We are forced to buy a unique one for each manufacturer and printer. They purposely make them different from each other even within the same vendor, so that small competitors cannot have the manufacturing capability to produce a full product line without huge startup costs. The result is that we pay a huge premium for the name brand or one of the few aftermarket versions, or go through hell refilling them.
Be careful here. Calling it a fuel cell doesn't mean you can carry around a bottle of ethyl alcohol and refill it yourself. It also doesn't mean you can go to the local convenience store and buy a stockpile of size AAA from one of a dozen competing companies. The business model that makes HP and Epson so much money now was copied from Gillette. Don't think for a second these guys won't try to go the same way.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I've heard of exploding batteries in mobile devices. I really hate to think about what the result will be if we end up with exploding fuel cells as well some day.
Of course I also wonder if your cell phone will be able to double as your lighter as well now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is rediculous. Thin film batteries are just around the corner, with a solid state electrolyte, they retain no memory, charge extremely fast, are cheap, high capacity, cannot break and leak chemicals, gas, or boil, and are paper thin to boot.
A fuel-cell powered cell phone would be the perfect example of "because we can" technology. Completely pointless, with little or no practicality, doesn't really advance anything, but it's cool as hell.
... what did you expect, something profound?
I think his point was that it's a pain in the rear to carry around extra "fuel" or to make a trip to buy some, when electrical outlets are pretty ubiquitous.
It's also worth noting that these fuel cells had better standardize on their "fuel" sooner than later, cuz I don't want to have to try to pick out the right one from a rack of 70 different types. In that respect, I fear that they'll very closely resemble batteries. Only instead of AA, AAA, C, D, I'll have to pick from words that look like they came from the ingredient list of a processed food packet.
Remember, kids - if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it.
Have you looked at the design of a motorcycle recently?
Fuel tank wedged between your legs, 20 litres of highly explosive fuel less than an inch from your bollocks.
Directly beneath said 20 litre tank of highly explosive fuel we have the engine, on a modern 600cc sportsbike we're talking about somewhere around 100bhp or around 75kW and that's at the crank. Say the engine is a not unreasonable 25% efficient, the "waste heat" output of the engine is 225kW. Yeah that's clever... placing a 225kW heater directly under the fuel tank. Way to go.
Actually the biggest problem is t-boning a muppet who hasn't seen you, that is the biggest risk of riding a bike and most of the heat's piped down the exhaust. It's amazing how risk averse some people are, they have no idea what the biggest risks are.
Deleted
Will the hydrogen station have a tiny little methanol pump, so I can fill my cell phone? What kind of exhaust pipe will the phone have? Will we start seeing 17-year-olds holding cell phones with wacky paint jobs, spoilers, and coffee-can mufflers?
You have raised an EXCELLENT point!
TFA states that MTI has arrangements with Gillette (who owns Duracell), which "is helping MTI Micro create a retail and distribution business for a market in disposable fuel cells." They also claim the market could demand up to 80 million units annually.
I've heard plenty about fuel cell cartridges while working in the power electronics research industry, but have yet to see any prototypes until your post inspired me to search. DMFCC has a photo on their home page of their prototype fuel cell cartridges, and judging from the style of container they could be fairly interchangeable.
In the end consumers will be at the mercy of decisions made by these large corporations, so one can only hope that standards will fall into place before too long.
"Don't hate the media, become the media." -Jello Biafra
At home you are already paying an electric bill. Why would you want to spend MORE money to power your phone?
Are you sure it would in fact be more money once fuel cell technology matures?
At work you aren't even paying the electric bill.
No, but your employer is, and if your work cell phone is fuel cell powered, and fuel cell turns out to be cheaper or lower-maintenance than buying a battery and charging it from a DC adapter, then guess what your employer will go for.
So the article states another among a long list of companies is working on a Fuel-Cell Powered device. Nothing has been made yet, not even a prototype. This is news?
This just in...
I'm working on a fuel cell device in my garage.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Well - who doesn't???? /Cell phone designer
Unless I'm missing something, Mythbusters don't do a 'trick my ride' type of thing. You'd have to encompass it into an urban legend.
"There's a myth that you can power your automobile with a fuel cell powered phone... what do you think Jamie, is it gonna happen?"
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
...2 days ago.
_ id=115&art_id=iol114776777396S315
Quote:
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click
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May 16 2006 at 12:04PM
Sao Paulo - At least five mobile phones have exploded over the last two months in Brazil, causing anxiety among phone users and making news headlines.
The incidents, representing only a fraction of the 89 million phones in circulation in Brazil, all involved Motorola phones.
The company said it was investigating and Brazil's telecommunication agency is pursuing the case as well.
In the most recent incident on April 30, the 34-year-old victim in Formosa, Goias state, had surgery for burns on her thighs and arms.
She was driving with the phone in her lap when it exploded.
Other accidents since the beginning of April were reported in Rio de Janeiro and three cities in Sao Paulo state.
Motorola said the probable cause of the explosion was that the owners used non-original or low-quality batteries.
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Hasn't happened in a while? I think it has.
~kainino
They leak water when they ring in your pocket.
Think about it.
"Is your cell phone in your shirt pocket or are you just drooling?"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So those stories about cell phones exploding at gas pumps may true after all!
Ethanol requires a much larger volume to reach toxicity. For "safety" reasons it could be flavored to taste terrible, perhaps like Mountain Dew.
Brazil already has these
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I've had shares in MTI for over a year now only to watch them wallow along in a display of volatile but slowly sinking value. A 30% boost is just what I like to see though it still doesn't cover what I forked out for them. If this bears fruit, then I might just have something to show from my investment.
...are fuel-cell powered AC outlets, which will cerainly result in cost-savings!
First, it was a joke.
Second, if you are trying to stick to a budget for whatever reason (I.E. I want to save X number of dollars in Y amount of time) and your costs increase in one area without a concordant increase in income, then costs have to be cut in another area. So... if the price of gas goes up by $50 a month, and their cell phone bill is $50 a month and the person figures they can go without a cell phone (We'll assume they already have a land line) then guess what... no more cell phone.
And besides, people shouldn't be driving and talking on the phone anyways.
The result is that we pay a huge premium for the name brand or one of the few aftermarket versions, or go through hell refilling them.
anyone tried one of theese "continuous ink flow system" kits that feeds the printer directly from big bottles of ink?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Instead of paying "Samsung Fuel Cell Co" $5 every time your phone runs low, get a hand-cranked mini generator to charge up your phone (and radio, and portable lights). One-time payment, then it runs off junk food forever. But there's no recurring revenue stream for Samsung, Duracell, Energizer, etc., hence you don't see these promoted.
=S
...show me the tools!
Laptop and cell phone battery life and performance do affect a lot of people, but what's given me the most grief is batteries for power tools. They're quirky, the companies discontinue them after a few years forcing you to buy new tools, and some tools are so power-hungry they run through 'em in minutes. Give a cordless circular saw an alcohol fuel cell and a 1/2 liter tank and contractors will snap them up by the thousands.