Digital Trends
You still can’t fill up your PDA with methanol and run it for days like MTI Micro was anticipating back in 2004, but the company’s fuel cell technologies for portable electronics came one step closer to reality on Tuesday with the introduction of a universal charger prototype. The pocket-sized charger generates enough electricity from a methanol fuel cell to recharge a cell phone ten times via a standard USB jack.
Next Monday, the Intel Core I7 launches, and I’ve been using a system that Intel sent out which not only has the Core I7 and X58 chipset, but two 4870 X2 ATI graphics cards and two of the company’s new high-speed flash drives.
To say that this system, (which has 4 real cores, and 4 virtual cores through hyperthreading, for a total of 8) is fast would be vastly understating the experience. The word amazing comes to mind, and I can hardly wait to put Windows 7 on it (is there such a thing as blindingly fast, squared?) Beyond the processor, or the graphics cards, the system also has around 130GB of second-generation SATA SSD drives.
Though most of us associate the term “fuel cell” with futuristic cars zipping around without gasoline, a company called MTI Micro has been working to develop its own breed of micro fuel cells for powering portable electronics. On Friday, the company revealed its latest prototype, a GPS unit powered by a methanol fuel cell.
According to MTI, the fuel cell generates about three times as much energy as four disposable AA batteries, delivering a solid 60 hours of run time from the GPS unit. The device has also been designed with a USB charging interface, allowing it to serve as a power station for other portable devices, including mobile phones, digital cameras, and portable media players.
Hydrogen fuel cells may usually come up when discussing next-gen fuel sources for automobiles, but Millenium Cell Inc. and Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies envisioned a different use for the technology: a portable generator. The companies announced on Thursday that they would debut a pre-production version of their HydroPak portable hydrogen-fueled generator at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The HydroPak will use disposable hydrogen fuel cells to provide instant power in the place of a traditional gasoline- or diesel-powered generator. It’s designed to be lighter and quieter than those options, and will also run indoors without problems thanks a to a lack of harmful emissions.
At a company event in Tokyo yesterday, Canon Inc. showed off a series of prototype hydrogen fuel cells which, it hopes, may begin replacing batteries in portable electronics gadgets like digital cameras, music players, and digital assistants within three years.
Canon showed three cells, a large-ish form aimed for devices like printers, another sized appropriately for digital still cameras, and a tiny third cell, roughly 1.6 by 1.3 inches (3 cm by 4 cm), aimed at small mobile devices like music players. A cell was shown operating inside an extension battery pack for Canon’s EOS Kiss Digital N professional-level digital camera; although the cell currently delivers about half the power of a traditional lithium-ion battery pack, Canon believes the fuel cell will be able to achieve three to five times the power of current battery technologies.
Toshiba is playing with different power sources to run MP3 players in the future as today they announced they’d developed two prototype direct methanol fuel cell units. These units are beingtested to validate their operation. The new fuel units, said Toshiba, have an output power of 100mW and 300mW and have been appliedto a flash-memory-based digital audio player and an HDD-based digital audio player, respectively. The 100mW is similar in shape and size to a pack of gum and delivers 35 hours on a charge, while the300mW delivers enough power to provide 60 hours on a single charge. The design of the fuel cell units reflects current moves toward international standardization of micro fuel cells and meetsthe International Electrotechnical Commission’s draft safety standards now under review. Toshiba expects the integration of these fuel cell units to appear into commercial units in and after 2007.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has set a new world record for fuel efficiency. The world record-holding PAC Car operates on a hydrogen-powered fuel cell. Using the lower heating values of hydrogen and gasoline as a conversion basis, this world record now stands at 5385 kilometers per liter of gasoline.
PAC Car has an optimized fuel cell system that produces electrical energy from hydrogen and drives two high-efficiency electric motors. The only “emission” from PAC Car is pure water. The car weighs in at less than 30 kilograms.
Leveraging SANYO’s latest advancements in fuel cells that increase the longevity of notebook batteries, IBM and SANYO jointly developed a basic design of a fuel cell power source. Based on thedesign, the companies developed a prototype fuel cell system that could supply up to 8 hours of power per cartridge on current and future ThinkPad models.
Unlike other prototypes that require a modified design to outfit fuel cell batteries, SANYO’s system was designed to be compatible with most current ThinkPad models without the need to alter the notebook design — demonstrating the resiliency of the ThinkPad notebook’s internal power architecture. The fuel cell system also includes an auxiliary bay IBM’s Ultrabay Slim Battery to supplement peak power consumption for business applications. In addition, the auxiliary bay could be used to make the power supply even more versatile by charging an Ultrabay Slim Battery.
“The world’s largest cell-phone maker, which only eight months ago signaled its commitment to fuel cells, said the technology isn’t yet mature.
However, Nokia’s Matti Naskali left the door open for future use of the technology. “Fuel-cell technology is promising and Nokia continues to follow it closely,” he said.”
Meanwhile Toshiba just announced the world smallest fuel cell developed for use in future CE devices.
Read more at USA Today
Source: Associated Press
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The fuel cell will feature in the 2006 edition of Guinness World Records, the perennially popular compendium of record-breaking feats and achievements.
Designed for integration into devices as small as digital music players, Toshiba’s DMFC is as long and wide as a thumb, only 22 x 56 x 4.5mm (maximum of 9.1mm with fuel tank). This size advantage offers greater design freedom to developers of handheld electronic devices, without any compromises in performance. Although small enough for integration into a wireless headset for mobile phones, the prototype is efficient enough to power an MP3 music player for as long as 20 hours on a single 2cc charge of highly concentrated methanol. The DMFC outputs 100 milliwatts of power, and can continue to do so, non-stop, for as long as users top up its integrated fuel tank a process that is as simple as it is safe.
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