Fuel cells promise non-stop conversation
POSTED 29 JAN 1998 If you need portable electric power, batteries are your only choice. But everyone knows they love going flat when they're needed most.
Fuel cells are a different story, theoretically capable of storing vastly
more energy. Instead of returning an electric charge that was stored in it,
like a battery, a fuel cell generates electricity by oxidizing fuel. Their
greater storage capacity makes fuel cells the number-one topic in energy
storage these days. Major auto makers are even talking about replacing
engines that burn petroleum products with cells that oxidize fuel without
combustion.
Bob Hockaday, a Los Alamos basement inventor, has much smaller ambitions. Instead of powering Cadillacs and Camrys, he's talking about juicing up cell phones.
.Bob Hockaday spent years refining fuel cells in this basement lab.The prototype fuel cell is printed on plastic. For a given size, fuel cells hold 50 times more energy than batteries.© 1998, Fred H. Rick
Cellular phone batteries peter out and need recharging after only a couple of hours of talking, he says, although they last much longer on standby. Hockaday is confident he can make a fuel cell that would power 100 hours worth of conversation and could be refueled simply by adding a wee dram of grain or wood alcohol.
Although he's now talking about cell phones, Hockaday's efforts started long before that modern necessity was invented. Eighteen years ago, he was in his apartment in Los Alamos, New Mexico, contemplating a new design for a fuel cell. "I thought it would work, and I put all these things together, and it did work," he recalls.
But the fuel cells remained a moonlight passion as Hockaday worked in the X-ray laser department at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then, three years ago, he got serious, took a leave from the nuclear weapons lab, and started full-time basement tinkering. As Hockaday refined his creation, a cooperative research and development agreement enabled him to take advantage of the National Lab's formidable engineering resources.
An old dream
This holy grail of energy combines the benefits of internal combustion
engines with those of batteries. Like gasoline engines, fuel cells extract
energy by combining oxygen with carbon and hydrogen atoms in fossil fuels.
Like batteries, they produce electricity without noise or moving parts.
Some fuel cells operate at high temperatures, but others, including
Hockaday's, work at room temperature.
While Hockaday's existing fuel cell makes only about 1 milliwatt
(one-thousandth of a watt), he says in six months of "brute-force
engineering" he'll boost that to the 300 milliwatts needed by a cellular
phone on standby.
And within one year, he wants his fuel cells to crank out 4 watts of power,
enough for a cell phone that's in use. From there, the company plans to
negotiate with phone or electronics companies to move the fuel cells to
market by 1999 or so.
After tackling the $1-billion-a-year market for cell phone batteries,
Hockaday wants to make fuel cells for laptop computers and other
power-hungry electronic gizmos.
Hockaday is hardly the only
inventor messing around with fuel cells. As he says, "Electrical power from
hydrocarbon fuels has been a dream of electrochemists for a long time." 
After years of struggling for support, on Jan. 21 Hockaday signed an
agreement with Manhattan Scientifics, a firm directed by New
York venture capitalist Marvin Maslow. On that date, Manhattan Scientifics
invested $1 million in Hockaday's solo operation, Energy Related Devices.
"If the micro-fuel cell invention does what we think it will, it will have
a profound effect on people's lives around the globe," Maslow said. "The
marketplace for this invention is vast."
A biological system?
To continue the biological analogy, since the only waste products are
carbon dioxide and water, Hockaday says the cells will "breathe" out these
innocuous compounds much as animals do.
Simplicity is also the key to making affordable consumer-electronics
products, and Hockaday says his patented cells can be printed virtually by
the square yard. "It's crude lithography. You lay down the mask, and a kind
of spray painting through the mask" creates a pattern of metal electrodes
and catalysts on top of a plastic film. The plastic is then folded and
assembled into cells. Need more power? Simply gang some cells together.
With the market for portable electronics exploding, Hockaday says he plans
to continue doing what he does best -- invent. "We'll crank out inventions
as fast as we can, so our competition will always be behind us."
The main allure of fuel
cells is their ability to store energy in hydrocarbons. As Hockaday notes,
living things also get energy from hydrocarbons -- and likewise without
combustion.
