Albany-- MTI Micro unit shows technology's promise for replacing standard batteries  
  
By SARA CLEMENCE, Business writer 
 
It looks like a PDA and acts like a PDA. But the silvery gadget being unveiled by MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc. is special: Instead of being powered by a battery, it runs on alcohol.

MTI Micro, a fuel-cell development company in Albany, announced today new technology that allows it to make its methanol-powered fuel cells just a couple of inches long.

The technology is known as Mobion, for "mobility" and "always on."

The new Mobion fuel cells, at 40 cubic centimeters, still need to get smaller for consumer electronics such as the personal digital assistant and portable game system MTI is showing them off in. They're not small enough to fit on your late-model cellphone. Not yet.

But the company is excited about meeting the target it announced earlier this year.

"People have never been able to come up with the size reduction we have," said William Acker, president and chief executive of MTI Micro, a subsidiary of Mechanical Technology Inc., which also makes precision measuring instruments. "This is to show the world, 'Yes, you can take a complete fuel cell and put it in a handheld device.' "

Experts say the development is important but in the context of continued progress.

"It means they've been really executing," said Atakan Ozbek, of energy research for ABI Research, a market research firm in Oyster Bay, Nassau County. "But to get from 40 (cubic centimeters) to 16 (cubic centimeters) is more important."

It's very hard to know how far ahead of the competition MTI Micro might be, he said.

"Most of this stuff is very confidential," Ozbek said.

Still, just a year and a half ago, MTI's fuel cell was the size of a deck of cards. At the annual meeting where it was demonstrated, the unit was connected to a cellphone by a cord. The cells don't need to be charged like current cellphone batteries; instead, they are refueled with methanol-filled cartridges.

The fuel cells create electricity through a chemical process where methanol reacts with water to make protons, electrons and carbon dioxide. The protons are able to migrate through a special membrane, but the electrons have to travel around it. Electricity is basically moving electrons.

On the other side of the membrane, the protons and electrons recombine with oxygen to create water vapor. MTI's old technology used pumps to recirculate the water through the process. That made for a complicated, space-consuming system.

In the new fuel cell, the membrane lets water pass back through to the start of the cycle. No pumps, no moving parts.

"It gets rid of much of that complexity," Acker said. "We have this very simple, elegant solution to the water problem."

The actual fuel cell, the heart of the unit, is the depth of about three credit cards stacked up, and about two inches long.

"It's small enough to put in and leave room for the fuel," Acker said.

The new fuel cell can also be mass-produced easily, he said, so can go from lab to factory.

But average consumers won't be able to run their laptops on methanol just yet. Last year, the U.S. Fuel Cell Council, an industry association based in Washington, D.C., conservatively estimated that portable fuel cells would take more than 5 percent of the global high-performance battery market by 2007.

MTI's strategy is to go after industrial and government customers first, proving the technology works, before going after the mass consumer market. The company plans to deliver its first commercial units by the end of the year to Intermec Technologies Corp. The Everett, Wash., company will use the cells in handheld gadgets designed to replace bar-code scanners.

The fuel cells have the potential to be lighter, last longer and create less pollution than the batteries used now in so many devices. In the future, they could allow the development of products with more features that can't be supported with traditional batteries.

But challenges still lie ahead. Methanol is flammable, and hazardous if ingested. Companies need to figure out how to package it safely. But those issues are not new, said Stephen Creager, professor of chemistry at Clemson University in South Carolina.

"If you're a smoker, you carry around a little thing of butane," he said. "You can engineer it. It can be safe."

But consumers still need to accept the products, said ABI Research's Ozbek. Will they be reliable? Easy to buy? Cheap enough?

"There are more unknowns than the knowns," he said. "But that certainly doesn't decrease the potential."