The major problem with smartphones is that they ran out of battery
soon and when you think about external power banks, the issue that arises, they are just not good enough if you don’t have access to a power
source or sun rays in case it is solar; what i want to say that they require
recharging as well.
Kraftwerk; power station in German, is a power pack
that is basically a tiny fuel cell and works with USB-powered devices. The
power pack relies on gas canisters to charge devices and is capable of
charging an iPhone 11 times before it requires gas refill.
It weighs in at 200 gram when full while measuring in at 3.94×2.95×1.18 inches. It features a single USB port that can be used for charging USB devices.
The working is quite simplistic; a gas canister – butane cigarette
lighter refill or the ones used at camping stoves – fill up the
kraftwerk. The creator, eZelleron, claims that once the tank is full the
device is capable of charging an iPhone up to 11 times. The gadget
makes use of LED lights to relay when the gadget requires refilling.
It only takes three seconds to
fill the reservoir in the Kraftwerk, which is much faster than charging a
giant lithium-ion battery, but why go back to hydrocarbons?
For all the disadvantages
hydrocarbons have, they come with extraordinary energy density. That’s
why the cost of renewable energy still hasn’t caught up to good
old-fashioned internal combustion. Of course, Kraftwerk is a fuel cell,
so it’s not actually burning the lighter gas (sometimes called camping
gas LPG fuel). Instead, it’s using a chemical reaction inside the fuel
cell to harvest the hydrogen atoms from butane generate power.
Kraftwerk sounds like a very
small, efficient solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). The reaction of
hydrocarbons (in the form of butane) and oxygen inside the fuel cell
gives you power (and a tiny bit of heat), but the exhaust from this
system isn’t bad. It’s just water vapor and carbon dioxide, not unlike
the exhaust coming from you. It’s apparently also safe to take on an
airplane. If the carbon output bothers you, there are eco-friendly LPG
fuels available that are made from renewable sources.
You can charge anything that connects over USB
with the Kraftwerk, but it only has the one port. That’s probably
because the sustained power output is just 2 watts, with peak power of
10 watts. That’s enough to charge a phone or tablet, but some newer
devices can accept up to 15 watts with Qualcomm Quick Charge enabled.
Capacity is hard to measure compared to lithium-ion cells, but a full
tank in the Kraftwerk should give you the equivalent of roughly
20,000mAh. However, you won’t lose anything to lithium-ion inefficiency
as you would with a battery.
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