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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."
the idea of someone being at an Ice Conference is troubling.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Protons carrying the charge, hmmm? I suppose any charged particle could theoretically carry a current, but I must admit I never thought of "proton flow" as a way to do it...
Water really is an interesting material.
Universal solvent (polar solvent, for you organic chemistry nitpickers)
Has its greatest density BEFORE it reaches its solid state of matter (ice). If you ever wondered why ponds and rivers don't freeze from the bottom up, that's the reason. Someone correct me, but I think the temperature of greatest density is 39F.
That's really quite a discovery... can't wait to see if they can make something useful out of it.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I can already see the headlines
New Scientist linked this story from the ice piece. I know this is sorta OT, but wow, I'm always stunned when I read a hail story like this.
Ice not nice.
I think a lot of electricity would be required to melt that volume of ice almost instantaniously. power lines are stationary. they can afford to run it for 10 seconds or even minutes to melt it. Spinning tires are a different story, Im afraid.
He and his colleagues have found ways to take advantage of the "protonic" semiconductor properties of frozen water...
That's bad right?
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.
So could this effect be applied to the skin of a Europoa ice rover that would melt its way through 2km of ice?
I always hear that using heat to melt it would be impractical, but with a drill and this electric field effect maybe something more energy efficient could be done?
"I'm about to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice!"
Powerlines that don't break under the load of ice.
Trains operating in extreme weather because rails
and cables can be cleaned of ice fast and efficiently.
Fast de-icing of car windows.
Maybe car tires with a far better grip on ice and
new snow mobiles that are able to climb extreme
slopes (for alpine rescue crews).
This tech will likely save more than a few lives.
The article mentions the possibility of making car tires that get 90% better grip in icy conditions, yet this article cares more about skiers.
...Or maybe they don't live in shockingly cold places like many of the rest of us (Minneapolis, MN here -- hi everyone) where they need to DRIVE in conditions like that constantly for 5-7 months of the year. It is one thing to live in Southern California and take a drive to the mountains to ski every once in a while -- it is something else completely to have to drive 20 miles to work on a frozen freeway...
For some reason, I'm thinking someone's vision on the uses for technology is a little out of focus here.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I imagine that most of you know the ideal gas law, ie that pressure and temperature are (almost) linearly related. So, if you increase the pressure, you should be able to melt snow or ice, right? If it gets colder, you just squeeze harder. This means that warm snow should be slipperier, since you can melt more snow, which will lubricate better, right?
Unfortunately, below 30 degrees Celsius or so, there is no way to get water, no matter what pressure you apply. Look at the following ice/water/vapour
diagram. You will notice that vapour and liquids don't take up much of it, it's ice almost everywhere. And all ice below 240K (=-33C) or so.
So how could we possibly ski at below -33C? The answer is that we just slide on the snow. Occam's razor, ya?
WorldRecord 1999
I've seen them ski in Les Arcs (France) in 1999 and although the view was very impressive, since then I'm convinced that these people are completely nuts or incredibly brave. :-)
Furthermore, I think that reducing ski-resistance is not going to help these people. I think it's wind resistance that's holding them back.
Cheers, Matt
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Just you wait! Global warming should take care of this little ice problem we have down here;-) Can't speak for a couple of miles in the atmosphere...
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
The low power requirements of a system like this remind me of an idea that I had a while back. High-ice surfaces such as bridges (freeze first) could be equipped with a system like this to melt the ice, and the power for the system could be generated by the pressure generated by the weight of passing vehicles. Some sort of storage mechanism would be needed, at least small scale, to keep the ice off when traffic isn't passing.
Of course IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) so I could be speaking from the wrong end here. Not sure on costs of such a system either but it seems like it could have benefit, especially considering how expensive bridges are to begin with.
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.
And the life cycle of such things is enormous. There are standards (codes in USenglish) to consider, which will need to be altered. Given the fear of litigation over design failure, the difficulty of proving the cost benefits, and the innate conservatism of people who make things that can be involved in major catastrophes, the development cycle could well be fifty years or more before there was any widespread application.
And perhaps that's why snowboards get mentioned. Like piezo tennis rackets, there will be early adopters who aren't actually very good at winter sports but have lots of cash and who will attribute the improvement that comes with practice to the miracle technology...might just sell.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"Many properties are completely different, but there are similarities between ice and the usual semiconductors," he says. For instance, he discovered that ice crystals can exhibit protonic photoconductivity. "It would be possible to create an ice solar cell," albeit one with substantially lower efficiency than silicon. Field effect transistors made of ice have also been developed that "work the same way as silicon."
Ok, who right away thought of turning north and south poles into electricity generating power plants?
You can't handle the truth.
POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0
Argh! That's black border, black screen! God Almighty, my brain is full of the same thing too, and I didn't even know it!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There once was a man named Petrenko
who found flow where you'd not think to think so
In white Russian ice
he could make juice flow nice
now he dreams of cool cash and green dough
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Canada has a purpose!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
If Man were meant to fly, he'd have wings!
And if he does, just think of the lawsuits!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
They live in New Hampshire. Not as bad as Minnesota, but clearly they have an idea of what icy roads are like.
Perhaps they are only thinking of melting the thin layer of ice that holds the rest onto the wire?
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
I like his adjustable skis. But how do you set the speed? It's not practical to bend over and tweak a knob on top while going down a hill; at least, it would not be good style.
But if the control circuit used, say, Bluetooth, and the control buttons were in, say, the pole handles, then the skier would have good control while staying in motion. This could be quite nice.
(If somebody tries to patent the idea with a later date than today, remember, you heard it first on Slashdot, making it potentially Prior Art.)
Agreed. Sounds like a load of pseudo-science fantasy from some unpeer-reviewed N00bie Scientists. AFAICR from physics, only electrons can conduct charge. Also, that's only about .0005W/m. Another problem, the lines are usually thickly insulated with rubber or something.
.002 decadollars.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to melt ice using two larger, parallel loads switched alternately between two sets of lines (PWM)? Also, every line should have a temp sensor to allow for temperature-compenstated capacity throttling. And for urban/suburban runs, for shit's sake put those ugly cables underground!
Also related: we need more spending on fusion power research so we can break our oil addiction. a fusion plant that produces a net gain in energy is likely to be huge, costing several G$. maybe solar+wind -> hydrogen is the way to go? replace natural gas w/ LH2? do your own electricity generation near home?
My
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
This tech will likely save more than a few lives.
Bah! Who cares! I just want my skis to be faster!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Bah! Who cares! I just want my skis to be faster!
Heh. As a 33 year-old man who just took up the sport of sliding on snow (on a snowboard -- today was my first day, as a matter of fact), I'm more interested in making my board slower.
And if the way my body feels right now is any indication, this technology may just save *my* life. :-)
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Fast de-icing of car windows.
Already done. Ford has had this for a while, if you see an older Ford with a bronze-ish tinted front windshield, it has this. GM I think has something like this, but it's clear.
The new method is faster because it hardly
heats the glass - only the ice.
Does anyone remember that agony of defeat guy from the old ABC Sport intro? Now imagine a lot more teenagers doing impressions of that guy becuase the tried to make their skis "faster".
Then again, maybe it'll remove some of the stupid people in the world.
Ed Wedig
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It is called triboluminescence. Mechanical stress causes some crystals to spark. Some hard candy can be seen to do this.