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De-Icing with Electricity, Not Heat
danspalding writes: "The New York Times has this article about using eletricity against ice. Turns out ice creates a reverse charge in whatever it binds to, and that that charge can be neutralized. Battery-powered ice cream scoopers can't be far behind."
"Ice is one of the unusual semiconductors in which electrical charges are conducted by moving protons instead of electrons. It was that property of ice that particularly intrigued Dr. Petrenko."
On a chemical level, how do protons shift the atom that they are part of the nucleus of? Is there a special property of crystals that makes this happen or is it just ice that does this?
Any information would be, well, informative...
I'm a concientious
University of Illinois has a very good article (with pictures!) about Proton conduction, proton channels, proton wells on water.
This page about Victor Petrenko, a little more technical than Slashdot's article
This one is brief, but says: "PROTONIC CHIPS NEVER FORGET Researchers at the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the use of protonic memory for making cheap forget-me-not computer chips. In 1995, they noticed during experiments on silicon wafers that protons deep within the wafers were responding to electrical signals on the surface. "Nobody had seen these moving protons before," says one scientist. Further research showed the protons can be precisely controlled with standard microcircuits -- and are thus able to store data. Protonic chips won't need the fancy processing used in "flash" and other so-called nonvolatile memory chips, and can operate at very low power levels, thus prolonging battery life in laptops. Protonic chips currently are being tested at Texas Instruments.
This PDFexplains the Mechanism of proton diffusion in the solid state protonic conductor Rb3H(SeO4)2, wich I assume is somewhat equivalent to the ice (haven't read the whole article yet) This
There's a detailed description and diagrams here. The process is referred to as the Grotthuss "hop-turn" mechanism.
Kind of like the old-style ski turns, though I think those are called stem-christies. (OK, it makes more sense if you've read the article and looked at their little sidebar image...)