Could this be yet another reason to head into a Brookstone store the next time you’re in the USA? As if another reason were necessary.
The purveyor of the world’s coolest electronic knick-knacks that you didn’t know you desperately needed until you saw them, has just announced a deal with Lilliputian Systems to sell the latter’s fuel cell charging device, which can charge an iPhone dozens of times before the fuel cell needs replacing.
The charger, said to itself be the size of a thick smartphone, uses butane cartridges as its energy source, and converts that butane into electricity, which then can be used to charge any device with a USB plug.
The butane cartridges are each about the size of a disposable cigarette lighter (indeed, they will be manufactured by the makers of said cigarette lighters), and will each cost “about the same as coffee from Starbucks”, a Lilliputian Systems executive said. It’s good to see Starbucks coffee finding a use as a metric like that. Better that than using it as a beverage. Frankly, I’d rather drink the butane.
Basically that means that, if you’re willing to carry around something the size of an extra mobile phone, you’ll be able to go one, possibly two weeks without needing a power supply for your phone. More realistically, it means you’ll be able to pop one of these into your bag, and not worry about charging emergencies for months on end.
Of course, announcing a deal is one thing. Actually having an elusive fuel cell charger in the store is quite another. These things have been bouncing around research labs forever and a day, but have been hard to commercialise for reasons I’ll get into in a moment.
Announcing the Brookstone deal, Lilliputian Systems said it would “make a formal product announcement in the coming months”. Let’s just hope it materialises.
The science of fuel cells can be a little daunting for non-scientists like me, but it seems that fuel cells convert liquid fuels directly into electricity by oxidising the fuel at very high temperatures. That’s opposed to, say, burning the fuel to heat water and using the steam to drive a turbine. Fuel cells are things that skip those intermediate steps.
In any case, the operative words there are “very high temperatures”. As far as I can tell (going back to a Newsweek article about Lilliputian Systems that was written in 2008), Lilliputian’s fuel cell operates at about 800 degrees Celsius, which of course would burn a hole through your bag (through your anything, really) except for the fact its innards have been encased in a vacuum, to keep the heat in.
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Elsewhere on Lilliputian’s website the company claims that its fuel cells are “reliable, safe (approved for use on aircraft) and environmentally friendly”, though convincing some TSA operative that they’re not a butane-powered bomb may be altogether another matter, when you try to bring one of these things home from the USA.
But this is the claim that sold me, again from Lilliputian’s website:
When compared to Lithium-Ion cell phone battery alternatives, Lilliputian’s solution provides a 5—10x improvement in volumetric energy density (energy density by volume) and 20—40x improvement in gravimetric energy density (energy density by weight) at a fraction of the cost.
If that’s true, that will be something to fly home about.
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