Samsung announces water-powered cell batteries
Samsung has announced that they have developed a new kind of cell phone battery powered by water and a hydrogen cartridge. Crave explains:
Here's how it works: When the handset is switched on, reaction between metal and water in the phone produce hydrogen gas. This is then channeled to the fuel cell, where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.Samsung says the new battery could last for up to 10 hours. Based on four hours of use daily on average, the hydrogen cartridge would have to be replaced about every five days.
Sounds good, but wake me up when I can simply pull out the little plastic tab and recharge my cell phone by putting it under the faucet, like a cheap squirt gun.
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Unfortunately your 'under the faucet' recharge isn't particularly likely to happen... water is the product of the reaction that releases energy in a fuel cell, while hydrogen and oxygen are the reactants. It WOULD be awfully nice though.
I have trouble believing in this, when the people who developed it aren't even capable of dividing ten by four correctly. (Yes, the math error originates in the original press release.)
Also this direct quote from Oh Yong-soo, vice president of Samsung Electro-Mechanics' research center: "Later handsets will be developed that don't need the hydrogen cartridges to be changed, and would only need to be filled with water."
Now that smells like perpetual-motion to me. Surely the next step would be to run the exhaust from the fuel cell (water vapor) to a condenser and use it to refill the water tank, resulting in a battery that runs forever.
As KATTW said, breaking apart water molecules takes energy. I would imagine that in this case the energy comes from the bonds in whatever metal they're using; in which case the metal will be used up by the reaction and need to be replaced. That much I can believe.
Something is missing from this story:
You take water, break it into hydrogen and oxygen, and combine the hydrogen with oxygen from the atmosphere, releasing energy in the process, which can be used to power the phone.
That's a circular process. If this worked then we'd have a perpetual motion machine.
It takes energy to break water into hydrogen and oxygen. Where does this energy come from?
If it comes from a battery, then the whole exercise is pointless - there's no energy gain.
The only way that this could work is if the energy used to split the water was harvested from the environment. That would be quite interesting.
But the links says nothing about anything like this.