Casio Develops World’s Smallest Fuel Cell for Laptop PCs
This article is high on promise but fuzzy on details about the “extracting hydrogen from methanol” part. Still, 16 hours of laptop power is no small feat.
The polymer electrolyte fuel cell, which is being developed for use in automobiles and home appliances, has been miniaturized to almost the same size as a conventional lithium ion battery. Its capacity is nearly four times higher than that of a conventional battery, and it can power a typical laptop computer for eight to 16 hours.
The unit features a device that extracts hydrogen from methanol and sends the hydrogen to the main fuel cell. Casio, working jointly with Akira Igarashi, an engineering professor at Kogakuin University, succeeded in making the device as small as a 500 yen coin so that the entire unit would fit in a laptop PC.