Intelligent Energy secures $7.5m to develop smartphone fuel cell Fuel cell specialist Intelligent Energy has announced that it has signed a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) with “an emerging smartphone OEM” to develop an embedded hydrogen fuel cell for powering smartphones for up to a week. The £5.25m ($7.5m) project will develop a fuel cell that will coexist with the smartphone’s existing …
I like this from the point of view that it's a start on an alternative energy supply to normal batteries and obviously with continued development it may become both more affordable as well as usable. Anyone have an idea of the relative differences in energy density/gramme between these cells and li-po batteries?
When are you science FICTION fed fools going to wake up ?
Hydrogen is the lightest element, highly reactive and Hindenberg level explosive. Due to low energy density it is quickly exhausted. It takes magnitudes more energy to create Hydrogen, H2 gas than is in the isolated gas. Learn some useful "Life Cycle Cost" analysis on the photocell scam...
"Green Prince of Darkness" at FauxScienceSlayer site....(and grow up)
We have a similar one to that at school, small solar panel linked to an H fuel cell. The whole thing mounted on a lightweight buggy chassis, power output is, to say the least, uninspiring. It will be interesting to see how it is implemented and what the source of hydrogen will be i.e. will it be from renewable energy or like a lot of the other 'green' fuels actually dependent on fossil fuel electricity generation.
"What fuel cells promise for IoT devices is a technology that can provide a lot more power than lithium ion batteries can in the equivalent power to weight/footprint form factor."
Yes! Because nothing compares to the warm and fuzzy feeling of safety that comes with having a hydrogen fuel cell smouldering along in everything from your wall thermostat to your smart lightbulb, while you're not at home...!
You can say the same for li- po s, I noticed the cover on my mate's play station was coming off, when I looked closer the Sony battery was double its normal thickness. When I told him how dangerous it could be he didn't believe until I shot a hole in it with an air rifle, not an explosion but a decent fire that could start something worse.
As a statistic such a thing is relatively low compared to the numbers of Li-pos out there, the same will apply eventually with hydrogen cells if they take off, A larger market and greater experience curve will drive development to the point where such things are an every day item and safe enough to be so.
Is not actually battery life - it is security at the hardware level.
Battery life (or lack of) is a nuisance, to be sure, but everywhere you can hope to get a connection, you generally have access to a wall socket or a USB charger. If you go out of range of either, there's a good chance you won't have connectivity either.
What we really need is secure-by-design IoT. Another thing would be IoT that is actually useful and not just for hipsters, but that can wait until security is baked in from the start.
I'd be interested in a comparison between butane fuel cells and hydrogen fuel cells. I don't know if the refill port for the butane fuel cells is the same as for, say, butane lighters. [Of course, hydrogen fuel cells are so much more green until you examine where the power for they hydrogen generation is usually coming from.] However, the idea of popping into a shop and getting another hydrogen canister is pretty appealing, which is definitely not Intelligent Energy has as their ideal logistics model, i.e. (pun intended) replacement fuel cell packs at a high consumer cost rather than a refill canisters.
I'm probably missing the obvious here... As a standalone charging unit, the offering makes a lot of sense for a niche set of consumers, looking for something to keep their mobile devices charged while they are on outdoor excursions and away from the grid.
If I'm off on an outdoor excursion, say into the woods, why would worry about my smartphone not working? I take it "off the grid" means power only and not coverage but where I go, there's no coverage either.
There are many services that a phone, or in my case tablet, can provide beyond phone/SMS/internet functionality. GPS immediately comes to mind, especially if you have offline mapping capability. I've also got quite a few surveying apps including those for RF related purposes. Lastly a ton of reference material and other reading (and no, no porn). Not everything has to be about communicating with others, but I'm wired to be anti-social.
Despite people being frightened about exhaust temperatures, they should be as safe as a hydrogen* powered fuel cell and produce no more heat, at the surface, than the battery in your 'phone today.
Unless you're the sort of person who cuts the labels out of clothes, to save weight, I've found that a modest solar panel and an external battery will keep iphone GPS going day after day in most places (not if you're caving:).
*petrol is truly frightening in comparison, but we've found ways to cope with that too.
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