Slashdot Mirror
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!
And when the methanol makes you go blind, you won't even have to wear sunglasses!
If your using your tech devices whilst in a sunny tanning situation, wouldn't it make more sense to have a solar charging unit handy and run all day without even needing a refill?
Let the alcohol refresh you without wasting it on your laptop.
liqbase
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!
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
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.
People might just do that if the fuel cells have a lifespan of a year.
Right.
Actually, this is the gillette principle.
Pure repeat sales, they would love to get us to do this, but your absolutely right.
I would use a fuel cell if:
1) I can purchase a 20 gallon barrel for pence and fill up at home.
2) each refill will last much longer than current tech.
liqbase
In what way can these ever be "saving energy"?
The fule Cell has to be manufactured, this has to have an energy cost associated with it, hence you are still using energy, your phone is still using energy, the same amount too.
Are fuel cells more efficent than power plants? With the cost of manufacture and distribution added in?
Now I may be wrong about this, however it is mine understanding that hydrogen used for cells and so forth is produced by applying an electrical charge to water, this causes the hydrogen and oxygen to divide and the gas is gathered and used in cells. At the moment this is done with wind powered or solar generators but when this comes a mass used device the "clean" and "conservative" methods will be tossed out the window(solar and wind can't possibly provide enough power) and replaced by regular power plants, so all in all you really will not have any power conservation.
I'm getting kind of tired of my old coal powered cell phone.
...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
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
Yeah, I too kinda wonder about the logic behind such a product.
I also have to wonder just how much more eco-friendly this would prove over the life of a phone - For a ballpark calculation, people replace their phones every two years and current phones need charging every two to three days. If this cell lasts twice as long that means it will eat between 120 and 180 cells over the life of the phone. Does one Li-ion battery really cause that much damage to the environment that 180 PEMs+tank represents an improvement???
For bigger things, like laptops, I can see the use of fuel cells as an auxilliary power source (though not replacing batteries outright). But for a cell phone, they last three days, not three hours, per charge. Even then, though, I have to wonder just how popular they would prove themselves.
Mostly, I see fuel cells as useful in places where we already use fluids (ie, gasoline) as a source of power, such as cars and generators. I also see a possible secondary market in places we currently use mostly non-rechargeable batteries, such as flashlights and radios. But targetting cell-phones, laptops, or any other device that already uses rechargeables seems like a sure way to make sure fuel cells never become popular.
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.
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.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
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.
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.'
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?
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.
My vision of future machines run amuck is a rusty R2 unit hanging out on a street corner with a cardboard sign reading "Will find prime numbers for methanol."
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
A common misunderstanding of the "hydrogen economy". In the idealized hydrogen economy, hydrogen is produced through thermolysis -- directly from heat, thus bypassing the (inefficient) electricity generation stage altogether. Also, since a fuel cell powered vehicle really is electric, it can readily be enabled to do power regeneration. Engines become lighter, cheaper, more efficient, and are freed from the necessity of running off of liquid hydrocarbon chains into something that can be more easily produced.
Other energy sources in a hydrogen economy include using peak solar power (you have extra energy in bright, sunny days), extra hydroelectric power in rainy times, and direct bacterial generation of hydrogen. In the former two cases, you're not starting with heat energy, so you're not losing energy to carnot cycle losses before you get the electricity for electrolysis (with best available tech, about 85% efficient).
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
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