Soon, from Samsung

Aug 13, 2007 13:12 GMT  ·  By

Traditional lithium-ion batteries used in notebook computers and all kinds of other mobile computing devices have a number of big disadvantages like short life under heavy load, increased weight, long recharge times and so on. Lately, these batteries cause much concern among customers and manufacturing companies as well, because of a number of incidents involving lithium-ion batteries for notebooks that overheated and led to fire hazards.

For some time now, Samsung and Toshiba have been working on a new technology that could be used as a replacement of the troubling lithium-ion batteries and the two companies are confident that the fuel cell approach is promising. According to the news site DailyTech, Samsung first presented such a technology a few months ago when a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC for short) was used to power a Q35 notebook. Despite being only a prototype, the DMFC was capable of sustaining the laptop for up to 8 hours daily for an entire month and it had an energy density of 650Wh/L and total energy storage of 1,200Wh. Even if the cell itself was rather large and cumbersome to move, being almost twice the size of the notebook, it is still very impressive, even more so since there is no other powering solution that can offer as much energy for a notebook and still be portable.

Since December, when that presentation took place, Samsung made a number of improvements to its DMFC design, notably the new prototype is much smaller, being the size of a few batteries only. Even so, the technology is still a few years away from the moment when it will be commercially available. "Though we still need to solve 'going smaller and sturdier' issues, I think that we have made a technical quantum leap in commercialization," said SAIT VP Dr. Hyuk Change in November. "Within 2~3 years, the fuel cells including those for laptops currently in development with Samsung SDI will be widely used as it is forecasted to acquire a stable market with lower price lines."