• Question: Could you make a water crystal power a genorater

    Asked by anon-355924 on 15 Mar 2023.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Ice is the crystalline form of water. We still don’t fully understand solid and liquid water and how it behaves completely. In fact, a few years ago, I ran a big international conference where we couldn’t even decide if the surface of water was acidic or basic.

      If you are thinking that solid water is piezoelectric and could be squeezed to generate electricity, that might work. But I don’t know if solid water is piezoelectric.

    • Photo: Joshua Bray

      Joshua Bray answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Kinda. You can split water into it’s constituent elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen, in various ways. You can then burn Hydrogen to power a generator…

      The challenge is in using less power to split the water than you get from burning the hydrogen.

    • Photo: Jo Ellis

      Jo Ellis answered on 15 Mar 2023:

      Interesting question there’s energy in the phase change between liquid water and ice , but tapping into that at a big enough scale is a challenge

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