What I Learnt Today: Water Can Freeze Even Past Its Boiling Point, ...

In a startling new discovery, researchers at MIT have found that confining water to very small spaces can keep it solid much beyond its normal boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius!

As we all know, water freezes at 0 degree Celsius and boils at 100 degrees. These temperatures can be changed slightly by applying pressure, and we know that water boils at different temperatures at different places.

But now, a never known property of water has been discovered, that it can stay in its solid stage much beyond its boiling point, opening up exciting new possibilities for the application of water in our daily lives.

One of the tests which shows the water solidified at a temperature of 105 degrees Celsius or more [Photo Credit]

To quote from the article

Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor in Chemical Engineering at MIT, explained that confining a fluid to a nano-cavity can actually distort its phase behavior and can change freezing and boiling point of the substance by a great amount. While testing, researchers found that water to be in solid state at 105 C and they believe that water could have maintained this state at 151 C. It is to be noticed that water boils at 100 C in normal conditions and it is for the first time that scientists have recorded such behavior of water.

We know for a fact that water can change between liquid, solid and gas depending on its temperature and such effects were expected, but the enormous magnitude of the change, and its direction (raising rather than lowering the freezing point), were a complete surprise to the researchers themselves, opening up new areas for the application of this property.

And one of the areas where this property of water is stated to be useful is in the manufacture of wires, so in the future, electrical devices could be powered with ice-filled wires according to these researchers!

Sources for the post and further reading

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What I Learnt Today: Water Can Freeze Even Past Its Boiling Point, When Confined in Small Spaces!