http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37481/113/Chicago (IL) – We have been hearing about fuel cells as the potential saviors of the PC industry’s 8-hour-notebook promise for quite some time, but the technology has yet to make a visible impact in products that are available to the consumer. In what appears to be a big month for fuel cells, Sharp, Sony and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported independently from each other significant progress that could take fuel cell closer to production units.
The first to show a new prototype device was Sony, which unveiled its hybrid fuel cell technology earlier this month at the Small Fuel Cells 2008 conference in Atlanta. The device, which was known to be in development for some time, combines a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) as well as a Li-polymer battery as a backup power storage system.
The device is about 50 mm x 30 mm in size, which covers about one third of the area of an average business card, in size and small enough to be integrated at least in some consumer electronics devices. The peak power output is just 3 watts, which won’t get your notebook or even mobile Internet device anywhere, but cellphones are possible target devices for this technology. According to Sony, 10 ml of methanol would be enough to enable a device to display 14 hours of movie watching on a mobile device.
Sharp today announced earlier today at the 15th Fuel Cell Symposium in Tokyo that it has achieved the world’s highest density for DMFCs at 0.3 watt/cc – which is a 7x improvement over Sharp’s preceding fuel cell technology. The use of its technology will make it possible, according to the company, “to develop fuel cells that have almost the same volume but a longer continuous-use lifespan than lithium-ion batteries.” Sharp aims to sue this technology for devices such as PDAs, electronic dictionaries, and notebook computers.
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