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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."
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.
There are a LOT of questions to be answered.
More than half your questions are answered by TFA. Before you start pointing out that there are too many issues for it to work, why don't you at least try to read the article. FTA:
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.
There's two of your (non)issues gone right there. It's not a fire hazard, and they are more eco-friendly than current batteries. Now before you respond asking what makes it more eco-friendly, it's actually explained in the article.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of 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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Actually it was just in international news, because someplace in the southern americas (I think it was Brazil) a whole rash of cellphones have been exploding lately, in motorola phones. Motorola says they're investigating, and they believe people were using third party batteries, which are often crap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hate to "burst your bubble," but methane only comprises about 7 percent of human flatus. 21 percent is hydrogen, so you'd do better to power a normal hydrogen fuel cell with it. The big daddy gas in flatus is nitrogen, because we swallow so much air, and is mostly responsible for the "pull my finger" variety of farts. Cows produce much more methane than people do because of their more efficient digestive system, most of the nitrogen and oxygen gets absorbed, leaving mostly methane and hydrogen.
... what did you expect, something profound?