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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Manhattan Scientific....MHTX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: allen v.w. who wrote (688)	2/10/2000 4:44:00 PM
From: Paul Schmidt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 942

Can anyone throw any light on any relationship between MHTX and Motorola such as cross-licensing of technology, or are we looking here at direct competition? Note timescale to consumer product thought to be 3-5 years despite energy density that seems to be higher than Manhattans recent prototype tests. February 9, 2000 ? Alcohol May Fuel Mobile Phones By Nadya Anscombe, EE Times RESEARCHERS AT Los Alamos National Laboratories and Motorola Corp. have designed a liquid methanol fuel cell with an energy density 10 times greater than conventional rechargeable batteries that could potentially be applied to mobile phones. Such phones could be powered by a small methanol reservoir about the size of an ink-pen cartridge that would last about a week, its developers said. The fuel cell operates at room temperature and because it does not use air pumps, heat exchangers or other devices used by conventional fuel cells, can fit a broad range of portable electronic products. According to the engineers, a catalyst--typically a mixture of platinum and ruthenium--promotes a reaction in a dilute mixture of methanol and water to form carbon dioxide, protons and electrons. The protons are conducted through an organic membrane to a second platinum catalyst, where they combine with oxygen from the air to form water. Some of the water is recycled back to mix with the methanol, and the excess is given off as water vapor together with the carbon dioxide gas. The electrons are available to drive electronics at a potential of about 0.5 volts. Bill Ooms, director of material, device and energy research at Motorola, said allowing for the movement of gases in and out of the cell is not a problem for integration into portable devices since zinc-air batteries in hearing aids use a similar mechanism, he said. Ooms said the main challenges with this technology are the catalyst chemistry and the design of the membrane. Most other fuel cell research has concentrated on hydrogen, but although methanol has the advantage of being a liquid and has a higher energy density than hydrogen, it needs a more complicated catalyst to function. Advances in catalysis chemistry, membrane research and circuit design have enabled this advance. Motorola researchers have designed circuitry that converts the low voltage of the fuel cell to the higher voltages required to allow the cell to replace conventional batteries and directly drive portable electronics. "Our prototype uses pulsewidth modulation, but with external switches to get low losses," Ooms said. "Our novel circuitry can start up my mobile phone with 0.5 volts. We are now planning to develop the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). But don't look in the shops just yet. Our development plan is three to five years. By then we hope to have an overall methanol conversion efficiency of 40 percent and small methanol cartridges, like today's ink-pen cartridges, for customers to refill their mobile devices. Each cartridge would power a mobile phone for around a week."