Remote Village - Dead Cell Phone - Need Help Now

DENVER, July 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Tellurex Corporation today unveiled a practical solution that combines native cooking fires and thermoelectric science to recharge cell phones and other portable electrical devices in remote villages and huts around the world. The Tellurex World Pot™ is one of more than thirty innovative products that are featured in the Design for the Other 90%, a Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum exhibition on display at RedLine in Denver, Colorado today through September 25.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110708/DE30406 )

The company conducted a live demonstration at the RedLine exhibit using a fully discharged cell phone and a common teakettle with an implanted high performance Tellurex thermoelectric module and a USB port. After less than two minutes atop a modest fire, the common teakettle had become an electric generator, enabling a Tellurex engineer to boot up the dead phone and place a call to a spectator, who was chosen at random. Meanwhile, the teakettle-generator also began to boil and sterilize water.

Watch product video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YoBaR5Quxc

The Tellurex World Pot can deliver important benefits to native people in the underdeveloped world who may benefit from far-reaching cellular coverage but are too often ambushed and robbed while trekking to distant charging stations for their phones. It may also be a life saver in any location hit by a natural disaster and power loss, where rescue may depend on keeping cell phone GPS and texting power working over several days, along with any mapping and compass apps.

"We've connected the past to the future and made it work," said Tellurex Chairman Clyde McKenzie. "Using a simple teakettle as a portable generator, we've created power for global communications from the kind of cooking fire that mankind has used for at least 250,000 years."

The Tellurex World Pot concept can be adapted to any of a variety of traditional metal cooking implements used across the underdeveloped world. Better yet, it can be manufactured in each country of use, creating new jobs where today people are surviving on less than one dollar a day with little opportunity to earn more.

Among the benefits of the Tellurex World Pot sitting atop a simple fire:

• 1 portable unit: will charge a cell phone, rechargeable batteries, or light up high intensity LED lights anywhere you can build a fire.
• 2 minutes: will power up a cell phone with a dead battery, send a text and transmit your GPS location.
• 36 minutes: can help sterilize 1 liter of water for drinking while 4 potatoes are baked in the coals of a campfire and a cell phone achieves a 20% charge.
• Light a dark hut: Alternatively, treating just 1 liter of water will trickle charge reusable batteries to power 4 high intensity LED lights for over 4 hours.
• Hike to safety: sterilizing 6 liters of water will fully charge a cell phone over 3.5 hours and provide an individual at risk a day-and-a-half of sterilized water that would be important to survive a natural disaster or hike to safety.
• Charge the village phones: imagine each fire in a 12-home village sterilizing 12 liters of water to comfortably sustain 36 people and fully charge twenty-four cell phones without the threat of losing a loved one to bandits on the trails.

Positioning itself as the global leader in new thermoelectric materials, engineering and technology, Tellurex Corporation uses the tagline: "Solutions for a World At Risk." The Michigan company provides thermal management and power generation engineering and design expertise to the medical and bio-medical markets and to industrial customers in automotive, diesel truck, electric generators, thermally managed circuitry enclosures, and telecom industries, as well as to the US military.

Heating and cooling cup holders—another Tellurex invention—are featured as standard equipment in the Cadillac Escalade Platinum Edition SUV. In 2011, the company will introduce its technology to home appliance and retail product markets in Australia, Korea and the United States. Search Google for "self-powered deploy-and-forget wireless sensors" and you will find Tellurex dominating Page One since an announcement at last year's Sensor's Expo trade show. And this month Michigan State University, with which Tellurex collaborates on materials research, will host the 30th International Conference on Thermoelectrics near Tellurex headquarters in Traverse City, Michigan.

"We've achieved our engineering objective for this project and continuous improvement is underway. We're searching out collaborations that may help us create the mass production that will be needed to distribute this elegant solution around the world by making the Tellurex World Pot affordable to a world that desperately needs it," McKenzie explained.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Please visit www.tellurex.com or contact Lawrence Dolph at +1.734.516.5841 or email [email protected].

SOURCE Tellurex Corporation