Samsung Creates Water-Powered Mobile Battery

1:59PM April 21, 2008 | Nick Broughall

Forget about Hydrogen cars – they’re too big. You need to start small when it comes to saving the planet. That’s why Samsung’s creation of a mobile phone battery that’s powered by good old H20 is so exciting.

The battery, which Samsung reckons will be in phones by 2010, converts the water to Hydrogen gas and Oxygen (who else is remembering their year 9 chemistry) when the mobile is switched on by reacting with metal inside the fuel cell.

According to Oh Yong-soo, vice president of Samsung Electro-Mechanics’ research centre, this is how it works:

“When the handset is turned on, metal and water in the phone react to
produce hydrogen gas. The gas is then supplied to the
fuel cell where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.”

Hit the jump for a diagram half in Korean illustrating the process.

Samsung thinks you’ll get about 10 hours worth of juice using their water-cell battery, almost double the life of today’s batteries. The downside is that if you use your phone for about 4 days on average, you’ll need to change the hydrogen cartridge every five days – which could make this a bit of an expensive endeavor.

However, Samsung thinks that they’ll be able to ditch the changeable fuel-cells within a few years.

“Later handsets will be developed that don’t need the hydrogen
cartridges to be changed, and would only need to be filled with water.”

[Samsung via Cnet AU]

RWB

April 24, 2008 at 1:17 AM

The reactive metal would need replacement, and surely it would cost more than recharging a battery. Also I suspect it would not be as compact as a rechargeable battery. If the metal is calcium (or something similar) it would convert to its hydroxide, which would account for the water consumption, and would also swell to take up a fair bit of space. I don’t understand the benefit of what they have achieved here. If we throw away a cartridge every 10 hours that adds up to a lot of waste. Maybe the disposable parts are not hazardous. As for the proposal that future handsets will run on water alone, and not need a cartridge to be changed, I’ll believe that when I see it. I am sure the engineers at Samsung are familiar with the laws of thermodynamics, but possibly their PR department is not.

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