Fuel Cell Technology for Laptops

January 4, 2010

Laptops are currently powered up by Lithium ion batteries. On an average such batteries give the mobile PCs a run-time life of about 3-5 hours. Some smaller laptops, or netbooks, with a boosted battery also give lives of about 8-10 hours. About a year and a half back, however, there were reports of a new technology that was emerging, which promised to provide much higher lives than Li-ion ones. This was called the fuel cell technology.

It was said that the fuel cell could provide almost 10 times more power than a Lithium ion battery. The other advantages of fuel cells were said to be that they can be topped up anytime on the go. A California based company called PolyFuel had developed a prototype which used methanol fuel to produce electricity, for driving devices. The size of the fuel cell was supposed to be quite small, just the size of a pack of cards.

A Lenovo T40 ThinkPad model was fitted with a fuel cell battery for trial. However, there hasn’t been much advancement in the fuel cell aspect, as we haven’t yet seen any full fledged laptop releases featuring this technology. We are not really sure if the fuel cell technology would have been a better solution than the Lithium ion batteries, in terms of the eco-friendliness either. So currently, it seems like the Li-ion technology is here to stay for longer.

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