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This may sound freaking crazy, but in two years, we will be using laptops powered by fuel cells. No, this isn’t some web-ring/chatroom/nerd convention fantasy; it is a projected date of delivery by the maker of the popular Satellite line of notebook PCs – Toshiba.

Thank heavens for fuel cells, because I was beginning to get angry about the pathetic weight and size of laptops and their dismal battery life. What good is having a DVD drive in a notebook, much less a DVD-R/RW (as in the new Toshiba Satellite 5205-S703), if the batteries last little more than two hours. And if you want a battery life of three or more hours, then you’re looking at either a 10-pound desktop replacement or a skimpy lightbook with a low-voltage (read weak) processor and integrated graphics.

Oh, and Mac people out there … shut up. The G3 processor allows for such good battery life because it’s so underpowered. We PC folk have our equivalent – the Caruso processor, which is used in a few new products such as Tablet PCs and other ultra light portables.

But back to the fuel cell technology. Does this mean that when our laptops break, there is going to be some sort of nuclear blast radius or something? No worries there. A fuel cell works by stripping bimolecular hydrogen (H2) into two protons and two electrons. The electrons travel through the circuit, powering whatever device the fuel cell is attached to. Then the electrons meet up with the two H+ protons and oxygen on the other side of the circuit to form water exhaust (the potent hydrogen molecule is thus made safe by converting it into harmless water).

So while there is no danger in fuel cells, I must mention that there has also been research done on harnessing the power of decaying radioactive materials to power notebooks, cell phones, etc, and that is just scary.

The fuel cells that Toshiba has developed have jumped two hurdles: size and intelligence. The cells require methanol as a source of hydrogen, and this methanol solution is most effective in a 6 percent concentration. The size of the cells was reduced by a factor of 10 by using the water exhaust to help dilute the methanol, thus using a smaller volume of more concentrated methanol “fuel.” The current prototype dimensions are 275 mm by 75 mm by 40 mm.

In the intelligence department, Toshiba has placed sensors in the fuel cell that monitor methanol levels as well as power requirements communicated from the PC to determine what rate of power output is required. Previous prototypes were only available as portable charging stations for traditional lithium ion batteries because they couldn’t be used as a direct power source to the laptop.

So do they deliver the goods? The two-pound cells offer between five and 10 hours of operation depending on whether they are equipped with a 4.2 or 2.5 ounce MeOH cartridge, and this number should go up as the technology progresses. 

That’s a good thing, considering the 15 percent increase in laptop sales this year and the growing amount of laptops shipped with 16-inch screens, dual hard drives and high octane graphics cards with separate processors requiring ever-more juice. That’s what things always come down to in the end – juice.

E-mail Esposito at respostio@media.ucla.edu.