Fuel-cell Powered Mobile Devices Coming Soon

Tired of your phone or iPod running out of juice after a few hours of use? Hopefully in a year or less we will begin to see fuel-cell powered devices thanks to the Department of Transportation for removing a roadblock which prevented fuel-cell type devices from being taken on airplanes.

"That was one of the largest challenges to this market, to overcome that regulation issue," said Sara Bradford, an energy and power systems consultant for Frost & Sullivan.

Fuel cells work by allowing very small amounts of fuel to flow inside a chip to generate electricity without combustion. Users would simply have to swap out the cell like they would with batteries.

If swapping out fuel cells sound annoying, then Lilliputian Systems plans to address it by introducing a portable fuel cell late next year for any device that can be charged via a USB port.

The cigarette-pack-size charger will use a canister of butane, the same fuel used in cigarette lighters, to juice up an iPod, BlackBerry, GPS device or digital camera, said Mouli Ramani, Lilliputian's vice president of business development.

Each teaspoon of fuel can provide 20 times more run time than a battery of the same size. They said the charging system would likely cost about $100 with the price coming down as more are sold. Each refill cartridge would cost $1 to $3.

MTI plans to introduce an external charger by late 2009 as it works with electronics manufacturers on building fuel cells into devices.

Lim said MTI has signed partnerships with the mobile phone division of Samsung Electronics Co. of Korea, a Japan-based digital camera company and Neo Solar Co. Ltd., which makes computers that are smaller than laptops.

We are getting closer to a fuel-cell powered world. Perhaps 2009 will be the year we make the most progress that we have ever made before.