Ice has a well-deserved reputation for being stiff and brittle, owing to its propensity to shatter into shards
Scientists created almost defect-free frozen water strands with surprising characteristics. Ice has a well-deserved reputation for being stiff and brittle, owing to its propensity to shatter into shards. If you try to bend an icicle, it will break in half. Peizhen Xu of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and colleagues utilized a needle with an electric voltage supplied to attract water vapor within a cooling chamber to generate the flexible ice.
The resultant ice whiskers were a few micrometers or less in diameter, a fraction of the width of an average human hair. Ice typically has flaws such as minor fractures, holes, or misaligned crystal portions. However, the carefully produced ice threads were made up of near-perfect ice crystals with unusual characteristics. The ice could be bent into a half-circle with a radius of tens of micrometers when handled at temperatures of –70° Celsius and –150° Celsius.
When the bending force was removed, the fibers returned to their original form. The ice on its inside edge is compressed when the fibers are bent. According to the latest observations, compression causes the ice to take on a distinct structure. That is to be anticipated for ice, known to change states based on pressure and temperature.
Snowflakes naturally create thin ice strands. Snowflakes, unlike the ice in the experiment, do not consist of single, perfect ice crystals. However, the researchers believe that tiny portions of the flakes may be single crystals, implying that small bits of snowflakes could flex.
This article is curated by Prittle Prattle News.
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