Energy from ceramics: "You’ve specially taken your laptop computer along so you can work while you travel, but before you’ve accomplished anything worthwhile, the battery has gone flat. The bugbear of notebook technology has always been its power supply. Developers have heralded micro fuel cells as the solution to the tiresome problem of mobile power supplies, but despite all their promises, not a single affordable miniaturized fuel cell is yet available for everyday use.

One reason for this situation, believes Dr. Michael Stelter of the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS in Dresden, is that the tiny power sources are put together from hundreds of filigree parts: “That makes them complicated to develop and expensive to manufacture.” The researcher and his colleagues are therefore pursuing a completely new approach, producing fuel cells from a new type of ceramic film called LTCC – Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic. The material has been in use in the chip industry for some time as a substrate for microelectronic components. "