News and New Products

Micro fuel cells may find niche applications

By Margery Conner, Technical Editor -- EDN, 4/4/2006

Most projections of the potential market for MFCs (micro fuel cell) assume that the cells will serve as replacements for lithium-ion battery packs and their chargers for the huge consumer-laptop and cell-phone markets. However, the extremely cost-sensitive consumer market doesn’t list MFCs’ compelling features—instant recharging and all-day runtimes--as “must-have” features. At the Portable Power Developer’s Conference, which took place this month in Richardson, TX, Jeremiah Bryant, senior research analyst for the Darnell Group, argued that the MFC industry’s future lies in targeting those applications for which the fuel cell’s features are essential, rather than nice options.

For most of the portable-electronics market, advances in battery technology couple with improved system power management to keep pace with increasing power demands from consumer applications and keep the more expensive MFCs out of the consumer market. Bryant suggests that, for MFCs to find profitable markets, their vendors must focus on what batteries can’t do at all, rather than touting the features of MFCs that are incremental improvements over batteries. Potential applications include military field applications; first- and early-response devices, such as those necessary to the emergency teams immediately after a hurricane, for example; and remote emergency beacons. Although they make up only a tiny portion of the consumer portable market, these applications represent a $1 billion market that is growing faster than the more mature consumer laptop/cell-phone market.