Water Confined in Nanotubes Becomes Solid

Water confined in nanotubes turns solid at boiling temperature.

One of the very few scientific things we learn about the world around us as children is that when the starts to boil it evaporates and becomes a gas. However, a new discovery can change this fact by using nanotubes which can turn boiling water into ice.

A team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology revealing their new discovery which apparently changes even some of the most basic certainties we had about water.

Scientists previously discovered that when a small quantity of water remains confined in small space, the freezing and boiling points can change by 10 degrees Celsius. However, researchers took this experiment one step above and trapped water in carbon nanotubes which can only contain a few molecules of water. During this experiments, they discovered much to their surprise that the initial phenomenon was drastically altered. When the trapped water reached the normal boiling point, instead of evaporating it turned solid into ice.

According to Michael Strano, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT as well as the lead author of the study, the fact that confining a fluid to a nanocavity can actually distort its phase behavior to such a degree was more surprising than anyone anticipated.

The nanotubes served as an extremely small pipe which was left open at both ends and had water at each opening. They observed the behavior of water using vibrational spectroscopy and discovered that even just a small different in the diameter of each carbon nanotube could lead to different freezing and boiling points for the confined water.

Although the water becomes solid, researchers did not observe the crystalline structure specific to ice and thus are resisting the idea of calling the current state of water in nanotubes as ice. However, the solid but non-ice water still maintains the unique thermal and electrical properties of ice. Another benefit is that the structure inside the nanotubes remains stable even at the room temperature, at which ice would begin to melt.

This discovery, besides being somewhat mind-bending, also can have several applications such as developing ice-filled wires which would prove to be much cheaper and less resource-demanding that the current materials we use.

What do you think about this new discovery?

Image source: Wikimedia

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Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.