Scientists Say Ice Has a Hidden Superpower: It Can Generate Electricity
It may not seem that ice does much except make roads slick during winter, cool down frost-rimmed drinks in the summer, and rise majestically from the ocean in the form of distant glaciers most of us will probably never see up close. It’s certainly important, but it doesn’t seem particularly exciting.
But ice, as it turns out, hides a superpower. According to a team of researchers, it turns out that ice is what’s called flexoelectric, which means that it generates electricity in response to the physical stress of bending (and similar types of deformation, such as twisting). This is different from piezoelectric materials, which accumulate an electric charge when subjected to pressure (quartz is piezoelectric). Obviously, an ice cube is not going to bend, but as a team of researchers found, electric properties can be activated by bending a much thinner sheet of ice. The team—led by physicist Xin Wen from Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China—also tried the experiment with salty ice, and found that not only can it, too, generate electric charge, it can create one a thousand times stronger than ice alone.
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