water as a super energy store
That water is the most common substance on Earth It doesn’t mean we know it at all.. In fact, a revolutionary new study has just shown that, under the right conditions, the liquid can take on properties that defy everything we know about it. And the research, published in the journal Naturereveals that water confined in nanometer spaces simultaneously becomes a electrical conductor and in a large energy store. The investigation. This discovery, which seems straight out of science fiction, not only opens the door to a new generation of technologies in energy and biomedicine, but also has an important Spanish seal. It has the key participation of the University of Granada (UGR) in an international team led by the University of Manchester and which has the Nobel Prize in Physics Andre Geim. Dual behavior. Scientists discovered that when water is trapped in channels just one or two nanometers—a space a million times smaller than a millimeter—its electrical behavior is completely transformed. It acquires, at the same time, two properties that until now were considered contradictory. The first of them is extreme electrical conductivity. This means that water becomes such a good conductor of energy that it reaches levels comparable to those of “superionic” liquidswhich means that protons can move through it with great ease. But it also makes it have a large storage capacity comparable to that of “ferroelectric” materials, with a dielectric constant that shoots up to values close to 1,000 when the normal value in water is approximately 80. Contradictory. This discovery is especially striking because it clashes head-on with previous work by the same team, published in Science in 2018. At that time, they concluded that confined water became “electrically dead.” How is it possible that it is now an electrical supermaterial? The answer lies in anisotropy: the properties of water change radically depending on the direction of measurement. The first study measured perpendicular to the layers that confined it; the new one has done it in parallel, revealing its true potential. Technological revolution. Having in a single material, and in water no less, a very high ionic conductivity and an unprecedented energy storage capacity is the dream of any engineer. This dual behavior could be the basis for a new technological era in several fields. One of them is logically energy, since the production of much smaller, safer, more efficient batteries and supercapacitors can be tested with ultra-fast charging times. But it also opens the door to creating a water purification membrane that requires drastically less energy. Spanish contribution. Measuring these properties on such an absurdly small scale was a technical feat, but the raw data obtained were a gibberish of complex signals. This is where the contribution of the University of Granada was decisive. René Fábregas, a researcher at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the UGR, developed a sophisticated mathematical model that allowed the avalanche of experimental data to be correctly interpreted. Their work was the “score” that gave meaning and coherence to the measurements, allowing the amazing properties of confined water to come to light. As pointed out by own statement from the UGRwithout this mathematical model, the discovery would not have been possible. Images | David Becker In Xataka | Millions in advertising convinced us that bottled water was healthier. Until microplastics arrived
