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A British technology company has claimed a major smartphone breakthrough by developing an iPhone that can go a week without recharging, running instead off a built-in hydrogen fuel cell.
Intelligent Energy has made a working iPhone 6 prototype containing both a rechargeable battery and its own patented technology, which creates electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, producing only small amounts of water and heat as waste.
The company is believed to be working closely with Apple. In what it claims is a world first, it has incorporated a fuel cell system into the current iPhone 6 without any alteration to the size or shape of the device. The only cosmetic differences compared with other handsets are rear vents so an imperceptible amount of water vapour can escape.
The plan is to offer the fuel cells as disposable cartridges.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday August 25 2015, @12:47PM
Yeah that was the old space age era ones with liq/gel electrolytes, where you have to control the temp very closely to control the electrolyte concentration, too hot and it boils all the water out and the reaction dies and too cold and the water doesn't boil out so the reaction dies. So you pretty much build a cell to run at 2 KW continuous and any time spent substantially outside the range of 2 KW is problematic. Its like a chemical RTG, you're getting watts like it or not.
Likewise in the intermediate past (like 80s tech, not 60s or 10s) cells came out that could eat methanol (the poisonous cousin of ethanol) to get H2 but the reaction had to maintain a certain rate to keep the catalyst hot enough to break down the methanol, more or less.
I donno if the newest cells work that way. Technologically I think it was always possible for a non water based electrolyte true H2 powered cell to run like a flow battery, anything from zero to full power, but there were mass/volume/power limitations.... Which may have been fixed.
From memory I remember there was substantial fuel cell weirdness where cell internal resistance depends on temp which depends on historical current draw, so its interesting to model and if you try REALLY hard you can make one oscillate, slowly.
Maybe a decade ago there was an addon for Orbiter the space simulator that went pretty realistically into aerospace fuel cell tech, including purge cycles etc.
I wonder how, or if, the linked company relates to Horizon, which has been selling this stuff for more than a decade, at least as described.
http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/#!advanced-technical-kits/c720 [horizonfuelcell.com]
They sell a dev kit for Arduino control of fuel cells. This came to my attention two ways, first I like fuel cells, and second it won once in a competition for the most expensive arduino shield/peripheral. If you have to ask how much it costs, I guarantee you can't afford it. Its a about a kilobuck for a full set of parts. Note that this is shipping working hardware, not a lab experiment or one off demonstrator, so this is what the tech "really" costs when shipped not whatever is in the PR stuff from the article. In my infinite spare time with an infinite pile of cash I'd think about buying one to fool around with.
Maybe a decade ago in QST or QEX magazine there was an article about using the Horizon gear to power a very small ham radio, roughly when the Horizon gear was new.
On the "good" side the price of shipping fuel cells means it would probably only double the cost of the phone.
One problem with training people to fumble around with little H2 cartridges is they're going to start asking why the system lifecycle cost is like $2K and why can't we just blow $100 of alkaline batteries or maybe rechargables for the same or higher performance.