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If they can figure out a way to actually recharge the fuel cell, and it is reliable enough this would be great to see added to devices so we can actually start seeing large increases in battery life.
The problem with re-charging it just via a cable supplying electrical power is that the system also needs water to produce hydrogen. And while it is possible to use humidity from the air, this is clearly less efficient than having liquid water available (and things would differ a lot depending on whether you did so in an arid or humid climate).
 
Now they need to fit one in the apple watch. That's where battery life really needs the enhancement.
Because the Apple Watch lasts a full day 95% of the time and the iPhone only 80%? Or because charging two devices daily is too much of a chore and there is no way people can go with a watch instead of phone and thus if a watch needs daily charging that by definition means you have to charge two devices every day.
 
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I don't see why this is a big deal, my iPhone battery already lasts a week, no problems. That is the average time my iPhone can stay charges, ON and On standby before it has to be xharged. About ONE WEEK!!!
 
There's some amount of chemical energy in those fuel cells and there's some probability of failure. I think it's more reasonable to have irrational fear than irrational naivety with those things. I know that from a technical point of view a fuel cell failure that leads to an explosion is very improbable, but not impossible at all.
The same applies to everything that stores a lot of energy: From petrol over natural gas to butane/propane tanks but also energy-dense batteries (or even hydropower reservoirs or anything fast-moving and having significant amount of mass).
 
Didn't the armed forces of certain countries (maybe yours?) develop a hydrogen bomb because it was more explosive than tnt and if so, why did they not consider to use gasoline instead?
The term 'hydrogen bomb' is usually used for a thermo-nuclear bomb.
 
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It depends on how you control it. You could also put flour in a can with a candle, a funnel, and a tube with a squeeze ball on it, squeeze the ball in order to puff the flour into the air and watch the enormous fireball that it creates.
I actually tried this and it didn't work. Dispersing the flour well enough is not easy.
 
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I think I'll be keeping something powered by a hydrogen fuel-cell out of my pocket, I value my manbits way too much to risk explosion.

So if it does explode, will Apple Support tell me that I was holding it wrong?
 
Here's some further info on fuel cells and hydrogen that might be useful:

The hydrogen fuel cell tanks in the Toyota Mirai are pressurized up to 10,000 psi, and hydrogen is 16 times lighter than air. So, if a tank were punctured or otherwise compromised, the hydrogen gas would instantaneously dissipate into the atmosphere, Hartline said.

John Kopasz, a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory who performs research on hydrogen gas production, said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline.

If a regular car's fuel tank is punctured, gasoline leaks out and pools beneath the vehicle, creating a ready source of fuel for a prolonged burn, Kopasz said.

In fact, in the case of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg, most of the fire was fueled by diesel fuel for the airship's engines and a flammable lacquer coating on the outside of the dirigible.
 
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The amount of hydrogen in that little iphone wouldn't make more than a barely audible puff if anything went wrong and it mixed with oxygen. It is like a none issue. At one time the amounts released during normal operation are so miniscule that absolutely nothing can go wrong.

I assume that you'd need some recharge station at home like the old battery recharge stations one used to have. Just that this one produces hydrogen from tap water and then it has a pump to press it into the phone when refueling.
It would be a 2 min procedure to load the phone for a week. While the station has a week in theory to produce the next load while you use the phone.
 
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Pretty awesome seeing these guys make headlines. They're a fairly small company that I'm quite familiar with, having worked with them during my undergraduate in EE Engineering. It's great to see them gaining wider recognition.

That aside, I personally don't see widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cells happening any tme soon; the technology simply doesn't match up to Li Ion batteries. Fuel cells are less efficient in more ways than one, and pose greater safety concerns. I won't bother writing a thesis on the subject, but we shall see in the next few years how this debate progresses.

Very exciting stuff nonetheless!
 
You don't think they are thinking of this? Jeez

Dunno .... you'd have thought Apple would have thought about an antenna system being shorted out when your hand bridges the 2 antennas whilst holding the phone in a perfectly natural way ... but they didn't.
 



iPhone-6-battery.jpg
British power technology company Intelligent Energy has developed an iPhone 6 prototype with a built-in fuel cell that supports hydrogen cartridges delivering up to a week's worth of battery life, according to The Telegraph. It also demonstrated a hydrogen-powered MacBook Air.

The patented fuel cell system, reportedly poised for its first major commercial deployment in cell towers across India over the next few weeks, creates electricity based on the chemical reaction of combining hydrogen and oxygen, which produces only small amounts of water vapor and heat as waste.

Intelligent Energy also introduced a hydrogen-powered iPhone charger called Upp based on the same technology last year, but its latest breakthrough has seen it fit the fuel cell portion of the technology alongside an iPhone 6 battery pack without altering the size or shape of the smartphone.

Henri Winand, CEO of Intelligent Energy:The only cosmetic difference on the iPhone 6 prototype is the addition of rear vents allowing a small amount of water vapor to escape. The Telegraph reports the device it saw at the company's Loughborough, United Kingdom headquarters also had a modified headphone socket for refuelling hydrogen gas, although likely only because it was a prototype.

Intelligent Energy plans to sell a disposable cartridge that will attach to the bottom of a smartphone and provide enough hydrogen-releasing powder "for a week of normal use," and the company's corporate finance chief Mark Lawson-Statham vaguely mentions having a "partner" on board -- speculated to be Apple, although both companies declined to comment as expected.The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are powered by 1,810 mAh and 2,915 mAh lithium-ion batteries respectively.

Article Link: Intelligent Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Can Now Fit Inside an iPhone

First the Lexus Hoverboard and now this??

We are now officially living in the future my friends, and I, for one, find it frickin' awesome!!
 
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"Rear vents for the "small amount of water vapor.."

Wait would this count as "steam punk"?
 
I've never been a friend of hydrogen fuel cells. I don't want to keep H/O-Tanks at my place and I don't want my phone to slowly exhaust water into my pocket. The additional heat does not help either (The efficiency of fuel cells is about 50%. That means that 50% of the generated energy goes into heat right away, whereas 50% goes into electricity, which eventually goes into heat as well. All in all your phone produces twice as much heat as before. That's a big problem). Also, the whole thing doesn't sound particularly ecological: Say you use electrolysis to get H and O out of water. That has an efficiency of like 50% as well. Then those two components are recombined in your phone with an efficiency of again 50%. So all in all of the electric energy you put in, only 25% can be used to power your phone. The rest is wasted. On the other hand, Li-Ion-batteries can store that energy with an efficiency of up to 90%. That should be the standard.

Besides, it's kind of dangerous. Without looking anything up, seven weeks lifetime means that the capacity is at least seven times that of a traditional Li-Ion battery. As the efficiency is 50%, that means that the fuel cell holds an energy of at least 14 times that of the battery. Exploding batteries can be scary, but an exploding fuel cell sounds a lot scarier to me. I don't like the thought of keeping that kind of energy in my pocket.

Since you're claiming to have knowledge of the efficiencies of fuel cells and manufacturing problems, would you care to share with us just how you know this?

Maybe start with a peer-reviewed paper that we could read?
 
Regardless of how safe/unsafe hydrogen fuel cells are, to extract hydrogen from whatever element it is married to, as it is not found by itself anywhere, the amount of energy (and process) used to extract hydrogen negates the supposed benefits.

Essentially, hydrogen fuel cells are a hybrid system, the fuel cell is used to charge a battery, albeit a smaller battery, and needs to be refilled with hydrogen when it runs out. Whereas you could just have a bigger (or more dense) battery and use less energy to charge the battery directly by electricity, instead of all the wasted energy used to extract the hydrogen first.

Hydrogen, when used as a rocket fuel, is just that, burned in a rocket to create thrust, not part of a fuel cell used to charge a battery. Hydrogen fuel cells just do not make sense for electrical devices at all. Especially with all the new battery/super capacitor/solar/charging tech being developed (and which, we will see and use in the next few years).
 
Since you're claiming to have knowledge of the efficiencies of fuel cells and manufacturing problems, would you care to share with us just how you know this?

Maybe start with a peer-reviewed paper that we could read?
This is a board about Apple products not a scientific convention. I looked those numbers up on wikipedia or vaguely remember them from some lectures. I don't claim they are absolutely exact, but they illustrate the problem the technology has. If you have something to add, why don't you do that? I'd love to see more exact numbers regarding electrolysis efficiency, transportation costs and losses and fuel cell efficiencies. I'd be surprised to see total efficiencies much better than 25%.
 
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Here's some further info on fuel cells and hydrogen that might be useful:

The hydrogen fuel cell tanks in the Toyota Mirai are pressurized up to 10,000 psi, and hydrogen is 16 times lighter than air. So, if a tank were punctured or otherwise compromised, the hydrogen gas would instantaneously dissipate into the atmosphere, Hartline said.

John Kopasz, a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory who performs research on hydrogen gas production, said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline.

If a regular car's fuel tank is punctured, gasoline leaks out and pools beneath the vehicle, creating a ready source of fuel for a prolonged burn, Kopasz said.

In fact, in the case of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg, most of the fire was fueled by diesel fuel for the airship's engines and a flammable lacquer coating on the outside of the dirigible.
You should probably link to your sources, this is the same article that came up earlier:
Maybe it's easier to explain my issue with these arguments through metaphor: If someone tells me that King Kong is really a docile ape and, besides, look how thick the bars are, then I'm left with three questions:

If the ape is docile, why do you need to keep it behind bars?
Does putting it behind bars change the nature of the beast?
If you thought the ape was more docile than it is, did you really make the bars strong enough?

The article doesn't answer any of that. It simply states a few factoids from people making fuel cell cars, then goes on to say the real problem is that hydrogen is expensive. I've no doubt that the industry wants to make the technology safe, and the article is hinting at explanations of how-- but not really giving them.

How do the 10,000psi and 16 times lighter than air numbers fit together, for example? It seems like two unrelated facts with a random conclusion. Why is a pool of liquid fuel more dangerous than a cloud of fuel/air mixture? Why is a prolonged burn more dangerous than a fast explosion?
 
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And a wet spot in your pants making everybody asking themselves if you either had a happy moment or were too late for the toilet.
A charge lasts 1 week; thus the amount of water vapor released per day would be so insignificant that it would be unnoticeable.
 
I can't wait for the era where the concept of daily-charging your phone is viewed as archaic and stupid.
 
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