Scientists from China and Spain have discovered that adding salt to ice can enable it to generate electricity, opening up the possibility of harnessing clean power in cold environments – with a twist.
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The team found that when salt-doped ice was bent, it could generate an electrical response comparable to some of the best ceramic materials used for their electrical properties.
The researchers used saline ice to fabricate devices that showed their potential to be used as a low-cost source of energy in cold environments.
“Despite 10 per cent of the Earth’s surface being covered by ice, ice power remains untapped,” the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Materials last month.
In August, the same team from China and Spain, along with researchers from Stony Brook University in New York, published a paper in Nature Physics revealing the potential for ice to generate power through bending.
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They found that this is possible due to flexoelectricity, or the generation of an electrical charge when a material is subjected to a source of strain that is not uniform.