June 2008

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ATLANTA, GA/ALBANY, NY - Hot ‘Lanta: That 1971 Allman Brothers Band song could well serve as anthem for what appears to be a fast-accelerating development curve and interest in small fuel cells for portable electronics.

After years of corporate hype promising small fuel cells in stores “just around the corner,” it’s beginning to look this time that launches in the next couple of years - or shortly thereafter - might be real.

Last month’s 10th Small Fuel Cell conference and the immediately preceding Fuel Cell & Battery Hybrid Systems symposium in Atlanta, both organized by the Massachusetts-based Knowledge Foundation, provided a pretty good look of what’s hot and what might be emerging in the market place in the reasonably near future.

The new, thin membrane material developed by MIT engineers for use in methanol fuel cells. (Photo courtesy Avni Argun and Nathan Ashcraft, MIT)

Beyond Atlanta, reports coming from Albany, Boston, Tokyo, Paris, and assorted other places of new small fuel cell developments seem to indicate that the international Small-Is-Beautiful fuel cell crowd is getting closer to a public launch date or two.

One of the highlights of the Atlanta sessions was Sony’s unveiling of what was described as the “prototype” of a tiny hybrid DMFC fuel cell linked to a lithium polymer battery as backup power storage system. As described by Shuji Goto, Sony’s DMFC Materials Group Leader, the miniature system, smaller than the palm of a hand, produces power constantly: when demand is low, the excess power is stored in the tiny battery and when load demand is high, both the fuel cell and the battery operate the mobile phone, digital camera, game console, Walkman, whatever.

Proper fuel flow is regulated by a micropump and the control circuit, and a new membrane enables low methanol permeation. A bar chart in Goto’s presentation indicated that the system permits close to 14 hours of TV viewing on a mobile phone from 10 cc of methanol.

Carl Kukkonen, CEO of Pasadena, CA-based Viaspace, Inc., a manufacturer or disposable fuel cartridges for portable electronics, called Sony’s data “impressive.” Sony revealed itself “as a player for the first time and captured a lot of attention,” he added.

MTI MicroFuel Cells, the Albany, NY-based developer of micro fuel cells, unveiled in Atlanta a prototype design for handheld global positioning system (GPS) devices, employing its trademarked Mobion unit. The company says the system provides three times as much power as GPS devices powered by four AA batteries, and it can run a model with a large color screen up to 60 hours.

But that announcement was overshadowed a few days later by another release saying MTI Micro had signed a development agreement with a Japanese global developer of digital cameras whom it didn’t identify to evaluate the feasibility of a Mobion-type fuel cell as power source for digital cameras. Coming after its previous announcement a couple of months earlier that it had developed a fuel cell- powered handgrip for single-lens reflex digital cameras (H&FCL March 08), it immediately it opened the floodgates of speculation of who that mystery partner might be.

Enter Canon: that Japanese camera maker announced in mid-May that it had also applied for a patent for a fuel cell-powered handgrip that, at first blush, looked somewhat like the MTI Micro handgrip.

Could it be that Canon is MTI Micro’s mystery partner? At least one photography blogger speculated on that. But a closer look makes this pretty unlikely:

First, why would Canon apply for a patent for something developed by somebody else? Secondly, MTI Micro’s Mobion runs on direct methanol. But Canon’s U.S. patent application, which lists Kanashiki and Masaaki in Yokohama as inventors, talks obliquely about PEM technology and hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. Nice try, but no cigar.

In Tokyo, meanwhile, Sharp announced at another fuel cell symposium there that it has achieved the highest density for direct methanol fuel cells with 0.3 watt/cc, said to be a 7% improvement over previous Sharp generations. The net effect, according to one media report from Tokyo, is that this permits development of fuel cells that have almost the same volume but a longer continuous-use life span than today’s lithium-ion batteries.

Closer to home, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that a research team led by Paula T. Hammond, Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering, has developed a new type of thin-film membrane material for DMFCs that is two orders of magnitude less permeable to methanol - a big reduction of the efficiency-debilitating, dreaded, methanol crossover effect - while still comparing favorably to tried-and-true standby Nafion in proton conductivity.

The net effect of the new material is that it increases power output of these devices by more than 50%, MIT said in a pretty detailed release. The new material was made possible by the use of a relatively new technique, so-called layer-by-layer assembly. “We were able to tune the structure of (our) film a few nanometers at a time,” Hammond was quoted in the release as saying. The team is now exploring whether the new film could completely replace Nafion - in the first tests showing these improvements, they simply coated a Nafion membrane with the new film - and whether it could find applications elsewhere, such as photovoltaics.

And things are happening elsewhere: media reports from Paris last month say researchers from France’s Atomic Energy Commission presented a small hybrid hydrogen fuel cell as backup power source for mobile phones, result of a joint development with French electronics maker STMicroelectronics. The hydrogen cartridges are being developed by the Bic company, best known for pens, lighters and razors (H&FCL June 06). The system is apparently not integrated into the phone itself but is carried as a belt pouch. It is described as powered primarily from the phone’s battery, switching to the fuel cell as needed. The device is expected to be ready for market by 2010, according to these reports.

STMicroelectronics was founded in 1987 by the merger of Italy’s SGS Microelettronica and France’s Thomson Semiconducteurs.

And under a Berlin dateline, the industry publication Electronics Supply & Manufacturing reported May 2 that a Russian organization, Aspect Association, has announced plans to mass-produce fuel cell charger for laptop computers by the end of next year. Aspect, described as the main state contractor for the development of portable fuel cells, is said to plan to co-develop the devices with its strategic partner Medis Technologies (H&FCL June 04, April, June 05) and produce as many as 10,000 units per month.

Contacts: Knowledge Foundation, 617/232-7400, x 203, dmello@knowledgefoundation.com; MTI Micro, Scott Estro, 415/233-6814, sestro@digcommunications.com; MIT News Office, Elizabeth Thompson, 617/253-2700, newsoffice@mit.edu; various media reports.