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Melting Away Ice Hazards
RadioheadKid writes "Dartmouth College Professor Victor F. Petrenko is getting a grip on ice. He and his colleagues have found ways to take advantage of the "protonic" semiconductor properties of frozen water. They see many applications of this discovery from melting ice on power lines to electronic speed control for skis and snowboards. I guess those Petrenkos just love the ice."
They are claiming a theoretical traction increase of 90%(!) potentially using some kind of conductive rubber in car tires.
What's most interesting about the opposite application (deicing) seems to be that they are using the ice to melt itself.
The deicing will clearly be more efficient, since resistive heaters are so very inefficient... but they should still have to expend at least the amount of energy that would be needed to convert the ice to water... 80 calories per gram, if I recall my Heat of Fusion values correctly (physics was like 15 years ago, so I may have that totally wrong)
Still, to avoid all those losses from inefficient resistive heaters? Potentially very lucrative tech here.
They even have prototypes already... I'm impressed.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
That's for relatively pure water, and that works out to be about 39 deg F. OF course adding salts and other things to raise the molarity (ionic concentration) of the water will depress the freezing point - I've forgotten what it'll do tho the density curve something about packing inefficiencies
..........FULL STOP.