Written on July 14, 2008 – 8:35 am | by Bogdan Alex |
I’m pretty happy with my cellphone’s 1 week battery life. I have a Sony Ericsson K800i and the thing is I don’t get to use it use it that intensively. But I’m sure there are many people out there who want to get the most out of their phones. I’ve read somewhere that the iPhone 3G comes with a battery that may last for around 5 hours when using it continuously in 3G mode. That’s not encouraging at all. Luckily, the battery life problem isn’t ignored and in the near future we could be benefitting from special fuel-cell batteries that can last for 2,700 hours of continuous operation.

MTI Micro is responsible for the development of the long lasting battery dubbed Mobion. In an industry report published by the Journal of Power Sources, tests conducted on direct methanol micro fuel cells show degradation of up to 35% after only 360 hours of operation. In addition to the 2,700 hours of continuous run-time, the Mobion test, which is still ongoing, successfully demonstrated a significant achievement by showing power degradation of less than 15% .

“Our test results are a clear indication of the technical progress we have made on performance metrics including life, degradation, temperature, and humidity levels which are required to bring products to market in the consumer electronics industry. To our knowledge, there are no other published results that match ours,” said Jim Prueitt, Vice President of Engineering and Operations at MTI Micro. “With these results, we believe we continue to be a leader in the micro fuel cell industry as we work toward the commercialization of our Mobion(R) power sources.”

MTI Micro’s intends to ready the Mobion battery for use in the multi-billion dollar consumer electronics industry for applications including cell phones, digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players and other handheld electronic devices. Mobion integrates a 100% methanol feed, passive DMFC technology that has been demonstrated in fully-functional prototypes and concept models in three primary product directions: external cord-free rechargeable power packs, attached fuel cell power sources and embedded micro fuel cell designs.