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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."
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.)