Practical Fuel Cells for Electronics

A new scheme for creating a compact device that efficiently converts methanol into hydrogen could make it practical to incorporate fuel cells into laptop computers and other portable electronics. Such a device could allow a laptop to run for 50 hours and be recharged instantly by swapping in a small fuel pack.

Fuel cells powered by methanol or another liquid fuel have long been held up as a solution to the ever-growing energy demands of portable electronics. But fuel cells that convert methanol directly into electricity are bulky. Fuel cells that run on hydrogen gas are much more compact, but the hydrogen, unlike liquid fuel, takes up too much space.
An ideal compromise would be a system that uses a hydrogen fuel cell but stores the hydrogen in liquid form as methanol until just before it’s needed. The hydrogen would be freed in a series of steps in a fuel processor that include heating the fuel to vaporize it, heating water for steam reforming, and further reactions for removing carbon monoxide. But the challenge has been to make them both small and efficient.

At last week’s American Chemical Society meeting in Boston, Ronald Besser, a professor of chemical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, NJ, described a new system that could solve the problem.

Technology Review