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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!
And when the methanol makes you go blind, you won't even have to wear sunglasses!
A Cell fueled Cell phone using the Cell processor.
That would be cool!
how long until
Batteries have always been nasty, from the very first lead-acid batteries on to today.
Lithium-ion batteries, for instance, have the habit of exploding when charged. It took a lot of engineering and electronics wrapped around the charging of lithium-ion batteries to make them safe for consumer use.
But when's the last time you heard about a lithium-ion battery exploding on someone? I haven't heard about it in a while. And it's been even longer since I've heard about it when it wasn't the person's fault.
There are "questions to be answered", sure, but you sort of act like this is news. I could equally write a "questions to be answered" post about automobiles, starting with the impossibility of storing gasoline correctly. There are people who can answer those questions called "engineers", and while I wouldn't jump on the first iteration of the technology, the battery field has a pretty good track record overall. If it comes out for consumer use, it'll almost certainly be very safe after six months on the market.
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.