The race for micro fuel cells that power devices is heating up. Several companies are anxiously working on developing and marketing micro fuel cells for portable devices. The most recent announcement by Samsung after Christmas allows you to run a laptop for a whole month, assuming it runs for eight hours a day.
The following is a list of fuel cell research published in the past 5 years.
- Wired News, 2002: A startup from Munich, SFC, has developed a micro fuel cell that runs on methanol or Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC).
- BBC News, 2003: NEC has unveiled a laptop computer that has a built-in fuel cell powered by 300 cubic centimeters of methanol, uses a catalyst to break this down into oxygen and hydrogen and generates heat and power as by-products.
Imagine a mobile device without the need to recharge ever. BBC News has a report on the work of Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic and his colleagues Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos about wireless power transfer.
The system is consisted of two antennas - one on the power source, the other on the device - resonating at 6.4MHz. The electromagnetic waves (energy) picked up by the device is used to recharge the battery. Resonance is a natural phenomena visibly observed in musical instruments.
In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate when excited by energy at a certain frequency. This frequency is known as the system’s natural frequency of vibration, resonant frequency, or eigenfrequency. A resonant object, whether mechanical, acoustic, or electrical, will be easy to vibrate at resonant frequency, and more difficult to vibrate at other frequencies.
What are consumers looking for when buying a new mobile platform? The answers are connectivity, form-factor, battery life and performance.
Simple, reliable, wireless connectivity
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), more than 95% of all laptop PCs are expected to have integrated Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) capability by 2006. In addition, IDC expects that by the end of 2005, there will be over 150,000 WLAN hotspots around the world — nearly a 300% increase from 2003.
The emerging interest in Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) connectivity for laptops is expected to grow over this period as well, aided by the growth of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) and CDMA2000 (1xRTT, 1XEV-DO) across geographical regions.