When you pull into a gas station in the future and say "fill 'er up," the attendant - or voice-activated pump? - may just ask you to be more specific: "Car or phone?"
Early-stage research and development under way at an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory may lead to the manufacturing of a new power source for cell phones: micro methanol fuel cells.
Researchers have been testing a prototype fuel cell that can be used to convert chemical energy in a fuel - such as methanol, a common hydrocarbon - to electrical energy. The fuel cell generates electricity by creating a circuit through which electrons in the fuel travel from a negative to a positive, or oxidizing, electrode.
"Electrical power from hydrocarbon fuels has been a dream of electrochemists for a long time," said inventor Robert Hockaday. "With hydrocarbon fuels, you can carry much more energy per pound. That specific energy is why biological systems run on them."
The primary benefit of the project is that the methanol fuel cells may last up to 50 times longer than today's consumer electronics' power sources, like nickel-cadmium batteries. Consumers would pour in 1.5 ounces of methanol every couple of weeks, instead of recharging the battery every day.
Hockaday is quite cautious about the potential commercial impact of the project, though he has already talked informally about the technology with all of the major players in the cellular phone industry. "We've spoken with all of the usual suspects," he said.
The micro fuel cell proof-of-concept technology is of a similar size and price but half the weight of the conventional nickel-cadmium batteries commonly used in cell phones, Hockaday said. Los Alamos continues to provide technical support through a cooperative research and development agreement with Hockaday's new company, Energy Related Devices.
An interesting possible benefit of the technology: The micro fuel cells should last at least 20 years, whereas conventional batteries are depleted in about two years.
There is some debate as to whether the technology could have a major impact on the commercial market any time soon, however.
Gene Smotkin, an expert on fuel cells at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said that there was some scientific question as to how practical fuel cells would be for consumer electronics usage. He also indicated that it would take many years to answer that question, and other scientific concerns about the project. But Doug Nelson, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, who is working on a fuel-cell-powered automobile, said he thought the idea was workable.
Commercial research on fuel cells is under way elsewhere as well. H Power Corp., a privately held company in Belleville, New Jersey, expects to be the first company to begin manufacturing fuel cells for the intelligent transportation system market - i.e. road signs - by the end of 1998, a spokesman said. Another firm, Plug Power LLC, formed last summer, is developing a residential fuel cell system. Prototypes are expected in June.
The Los Alamos fuel cells are "non-bipolar," said Hockaday, meaning that the positive electrodes are all on one side and the negatives on the opposite side. The electrodes provide elementary electrical connections at low power, and the fuel cells are stacked up to generate more power. Manufacturing them will be relatively simple, he said, as the fuel cell elements can be printed by the millions on a single sheet of plastic.
Work on the project began 10 years ago at Los Alamos, and continued in Hockaday's basement during his off-hours. He departed from Los Alamos - the lab where the first nuclear devices were built during World War II - three years ago to develop the technology. Last month, he received $1 million in funding from a venture-capital firm and hired staff to take the project from the proof-of-concept stage to the manufacturing-prototype phase, and eventually the commercial market.
