Toshiba boffins prep laptop fuel cell

[KennyR]

One of the biggest problems with fuel cells is price. To get reactions to happen at that scale (you're actually burning the fuel), you need a catalyst - namely platinum and rhodium. Platinum is worth more than gold, and rhodium is the most expensive metal on today's market.

Although the design of the catalysts use as little of these precious metals as possible, they do use them, and it's likely it would cost less for many lead-acid/nickel-cadmium batteries than it would for one fuel cell. While the fuel cell would be a lot cheaper in the long run, the short run would make the price-obsessed world market ignore them. This is the first big hurdle fuel cell technology has to face.

And we all know that people are price obsessed, don't we? (/me points finger accusingly at x86 crowd)

[KennyR]

Given that I have designed and build several Fuel cells (I'm a Chemist you see), I would like to point out that the catalyst in a fuel cell is actually Nickel!

I'm a chemist too, and though I've never built a fuel cell myself I can say with 90% certainty that commerical direct-methanol fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst. Nickel is too reactive with hydrogen, too inefficient at usable portable-device temperatures (50-130 C), and too easily poisoned to be used in a fuel cell the size of a mobile phone battery.

Here's a nice paper on how modern direct-methanol fuel cells work:

http://www.ott.doe.gov/pdfs/16-gottesfeld.pdf

[KennyR]

What about the weight?
Will they be lighter or about the same as batteries today?

The intention is to make them the same size and weight as laptop batteries. At first they may be a bit heavier, but as they get better designs they'll get lighter.