MTI Micro pushes tech leadership with latest Mobion chip

ALBANY, NY, USA, June 5, 2007. MTI MicroFuel Cells has demonstrated the Mobion® integrated fuel cell chip at the heart of its micro direct methanol fuel cell technology for consumer electronics applications.

The state-of-the-art Mobion chip integrates a power module with fluid conditioning that allows the system to run in a wide environmental range, including temperatures from 0°C to 40°C at any humidity level – an industry standard, and a requirement of many OEMs who want to integrate fuel cells into their products.

The injection-molded chip has been designed for high-volume manufacturing. In addition, MTI Micro has continued to integrate more functionality into its chips while reducing its part count, ultimately achieving a single molded piece. The company has also reduced the chip size by more than 40% in the last six months, to just 9 cm3.

The Mobion chip can be used in orientation-independent systems, and in lab testing it has demonstrated a power output of more than 50 mW/cm2, while producing 1.4 Wh/cm3 of energy from the fuel. MTI Micro says that this is two to three times more power than its competitors have publicly reported.

“MTI Micro’s proprietary Mobion chip architecture significantly reduces the complexity of a fuel cell system’s internal construction, thereby reducing manufacturing costs, increasing performance, and enabling further system miniaturization,” explains Peng Lim, CEO of MTI.

The company’s innovative design makes it possible to operate the chips without the need for fuel recirculation or water retrieval and pumping – two issues that have complicated the development of DMFCs and made it difficult to reduce their size. The company has filed more than 85 patents on various aspects of its technology.

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