A Butane Recharger for Your Cellphone

We live in a miraculous age in which we can carry computers around in our backpacks, pockets, and pocketbooks. But portable devices are only as good as the power within them, and as they get more powerful, they need more and more power.

Battery technologies keep getting better but still aren’t better enough for 14-hour flights over the Pacific or watching the Olympics all day on a cellphone.

For decades, we’ve dickered with fuel cells, mostly based around portable proton exchange membranes [PEMs]. But even the military, which has been more interested in portability than anyone, doesn’t use them much.

One company has been working on a different strategy that would use butane, the same substance we walk around with in our cigarette lighters. Back in 2008, my colleague Phil Ross looked into it and declared it a loser for our then-annual look at the upcoming year’s highlights and lowlights.

Longevity was one issue. Phil asked how “the electrodes could last through many heating and cooling cycles, which would cause the ceramic and silicon layers to expand and contract at different rates?”

Then there were what Phil called the marketing issues. “Can everyday users be trained to carry fuel around? To stock up on cartridges of it and keep them in their desk drawers, briefcases, and glove compartments?”

We do all that with batteries, but batteries are so generally useful that you can buy them in every airport shop, drugstore, and gas station. Will retail outlets in out-of-the-way places stock butane fuel cells? Phil wondered. Will fuel cells be allowed past security at airports?

The company we singled out as most promising, but still a loser, despite an MIT pedigree and US $40 million in start-up funding, was Lilliputian Systems, based in Wilmington, Mass., which is about 15 miles north of Boston.

The company recently announced a partnership with Brookstone, the company whose airport stores many of us have probably stopped in at one time or another, for its first commercial product release early next year. My guest today, by phone, is Mouli Ramani, Lilliputian’s vice president of marketing and business development. Mouli, welcome to the podcast.

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