Confirmation needed

[gizander]

Hello again All!

I've been fiddling with homemade Aluminum-air batteries and would like to put them to some practical use. We might be in for a couple more bad hurricanes here so I wanted to make a cell phone charger that runs off an Al-Air cell. With a single cell and not using any "dangerous" chemicals I get about 0.8 Volts and the inside surface area of a beer can gives me about 250 mA. If I use a voltage doubler type circuit to step up the 0.8V to 4 Volts am I correct in calculating that I will reduce the output current to 50 mA (250 divided by 5)?
Second, I was told that as long as I have any sort of overvoltage I can connect leads directly to the cell electrodes and charge, say, a 3.7 V cell phone battery. Is that correct?
And third, can anyone point me to a schematic for a good dc voltage "transformer" to get something over 3.7 V (about 4 i think would do...???) from just 0.8V from a single cell? Thanks everyone!

gizander

 

[3v0]

Just use several cans in series to increase the voltage without reducing the current.

 

[gizander]

Thanks for the idea. I considered that but that would mean people needing to buy many sodas or beers just to charge their cell (most people here don't buy canned drinks--they might have one can lying around). Also, using a battery of cells would increase manufacturing cost since the air electrode used per cell is very expensive......--unless you know of a good source of really cheap catalyzed air electrodes...
I was thinking of using a capacitor charge pump to boost voltage (switched regulators need inductors which are very very difficult to get here...)
Any thoughts?