Thin Water Acts Like a Solid

Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."

Nanoscale lubricant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, based on poor results getting it on in a swimmin pool, I can verify that water is a lousy lubricant at normal scale!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what you're saying is, your equipment isn't quite small enough to qualify as nanoscale?

I keed, I keed...

Re:Nanoscale lubricant?

[Pesh Hawksfire (928893)]

Rule 24 of the internet: Pics or it didn't happen.

Re:

[itlurksbeneath (952654)]

Hey! I remember [snopes.com] that guy...
How's it hanging? Hehe..

Not only thin...

[gillbates (106458)]

But cold water also acts like a solid at times.

Re:Not only thin...

[wsherman (154283)]

But cold water also acts like a solid at times.

Unless you're trying to walk on it - then it acts like a banana.

Re:Not only thin...

[Some_Llama (763766)]

But cold water also acts like a solid at times.

Unless you're trying to walk on it - then it acts like a banana.

And when you're trying to stick your tongue to it, then it acts like an adhesive.

Re:

[eMbry00s (952989)]

All of this is clearly proof that we were created by design and that god loves us.

in other news

[butterflysrage (1066514)]

Canadians and those from other northen countries let out an audible "DUH!" when reading a Slashdot article that stated that solid water is slippery. Speed skaters everywhere found rolling on the floor in hystarics.

more at 6:00

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're partially right. The liquid water on frozen water is indeed very slippery. This is what allows ice skaters to skate, the blade glides along a thin film of liquid water. Frozen water on its own, however is not that slick.

Re:

[aliquis (678370)]

I thought it was still various theories on this and no real prove that it's really a liquid water film on top of the ice?

Duh, Roland

[iamlucky13 (795185)]

Density and viscosity are the primary factors when choosing a lubricant. Water happens to have a pretty low viscosity. The point of article is that the effective viscosity increases by several orders of magnitude in truely thin sheets and takes an ordered form like a solid in one direction but not the others, not that thicker films of water can be used as a lubricant. In fact, they found that as the gap gets down to a nanometer, it becomes a less effective lubricant.

I started typing this and thought to myself, "Something about the way that submission is written and how it misses the point of the article smells of Roland Piquepaille."

I wasn't at all surprised when I went back and checked the author to see his name and standard question-link-quote writing format.

Now I'm curious because the pressure they apply seems to be of interest here. I'm curious if 3 dimensional order appears under high isotropic pressures. If so, I'd expect this to be possible in larger volumes with sufficient pressure, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the viscosity increased, too.

Re:

[snoop.daub (1093313)]

Yes, liquid water under pressure at room temperature will indeed solidify. You need a hell of a lot of pressure, and the crystal form will be one of the other 12 known forms of ice, not the familiar ice(I) we know and love. In this case, it's actually ice(VII), a high pressure form consisting of two interpenetrating cubic lattices. The interpenetrating lattices allow more water to squeeze into a smaller space than in the liquid. Water is a truly unique substance, from a physical chemistry standpoint. I

Re:

[AikonMGB (1013995)]

If I'm not mistake, solid water isn't actually slipper in and of itself.. its the thin layer of liquid water we create whenever touching it and applying pressure. Look up curling [wikipedia.org].

Of course I'm open to enlightenment if I've got something wrong.

Aikon-

We already know this...

[kansei (731975)]

...it's called prison lube.

Re:We already know this...

[jcgf (688310)]

uh, how did you know that?

But what is the channel made of?

[cyfer2000 (548592)]

If it is hydrophobic, what we see may actually be the effect of lost entropy due to rearrangement of water molecules, rather than compression.

Re:But what is the channel made of?

[snoop.daub (1093313)]

This is a hydrophilic channel. In a hydrophobic channel, the vapor phase is more stable than the liquid, so you get "cavitation" or "dewetting", as you approach the walls of the channel closer and closer, at some point all the water gets pushed out of the channel and the walls get pushed together.

The phenomenon is well understood in the hydrophobic case, both experimentally and in simulations. This experiment is new, up till now they couldn't get down to such small separations, but they are overstating the case when they claim that this is a complete surprise... as another poster said, many many simulation studies have suggested a structuring of water near hydrophilic surfaces.

Another neat thing happens when you have one wall hydrophobic and one wall hydrophilic. This has been dubbed a "Janus interface" after the two-faced Roman god, and there's a lot of interest in them.

Re:But what is the channel made of?

[cyfer2000 (548592)]

OK, I read the paper, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115415.

They did experiment with a Molecular Iamge PicoPlus AFM with the funny sound proof box and rubber bands, if you saw such a system you will know what I mean. The tip they used had a stiff cantilever and was "likely to be oxidized". They carefully controlled the sample surface and make it perpendicular to the tip. And they did the experiment on three surface, mica, soda lime untreated glass and highly oriented hydrophobic graphite.

And the result is hydrophilic surfaces showed increased viscosity and the hydrophobic surface showed no change.

the actual reference...

[kebes (861706)]

There's actually alot of evidence in the literature suggesting that water forms a "structured layer" on hydrophillic (water-compatible) surfaces, and around hydrophillic objects dispersed in water. For instance the mobility of water that structures around proteins has been described in the literature as "ice-like." These measurements are typically based on the density of the water or using things like conductivity to infer mobility.

So the notion of water forming solid-like structures near surfaces is not entirely new. However, direct mechanical measurements of the mobility/viscosity of those last few atomic layers of water are not easy, so this paper certainly adds a valuable contribution to the field.

The actual scientific paper in question can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115415 [doi.org]

Re:the actual reference...

[kebes (861706)]

For anyone interested, the figures in the paper show clearly the structuring of water in layers near the surface. Moreover they directly measure that the viscosity jumps up considerably for distances less than 2 nm. The viscosity goes from the bulk water value (9E-4 Pa*s) when far from the surface, and increases to as high as 50 Pa*s (500 Poise or 50,000 cP) in the last 0.5 nm. To give you an rough idea of what this means, note that 50,000 cP is similar to the (bulk) viscosity of things like honey or ketchup (for a random table of values, see here [xtronics.com] or here [hypertextbook.com]).

Of course this higher-viscosity persists only over a very short-range, but understanding these "nano-mechanical" properties is crucial for the design and construction of future nano-scale devices.

Folding@Home did research with this

[cdogbert (964753)]

From what I can tell, F@H touched on this [stanford.edu] a while ago. I was reading the PS3 F@H articles, browsing through the "what good does F@H do?" and the "F@H is just a feel-good project" comments and looking at the results page [stanford.edu] when I stumbled across the above PDF and thought "Hey, that looks like something slashdot just reported on."

more prior research

[commodoresloat (172735)]

Turns out some guy in the middle east figured this out a couple of millennia ago. They called him the Nazarene or something; apparently even did some tricks where he walked on the stuff. Once again, slashdot is just recycling old news.

IANASBIPOOTV But, DUH!

[WED Fan (911325)]

"What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid.

Alright, you know, if you had asked me this question, way back when, I would have said it acts like a solid. Why is this news, am I missing something?

Re:IANASBIPOOTV But, DUH!

[mstahl (701501)]

Oh my god I can't believe I actually read that as "I Am Not A Scientist But I Play One On TV". . . .

Be back soon guys . . . I'm gonna go outside for a while.

Re:

[WED Fan (911325)]

Bonus points.

Re:

[Pollardito (781263)]

i can't imagine how many resources we waste every year researching and demonstrating things that we would have known for free had we just asked you "way back when". actually, i imagine if i just ask you how much we'd save with this method that'd be easier than trying to calculate it

Re:

[Pollardito (781263)]

well, my reply was just me teasing, but the thing that makes this unintuitive is that water as a solid is not more dense, so one wouldn't necessarily expect water that's been condensed to act like solid water, and as a matter of fact there had been studies that it didn't :

In its bulk liquid form, water is a disordered medium that flows very readily. When most substances are compressed into a solid, their density increases. But water is different; when it becomes ice, it becomes less dense. For this reason,

Ripley's Believe It or Not Ball

[infosystech (1093309)]

How about just outside the Gatlinburg museum's entrance, visitors can see a 5-ton solid granite ball floating and spinning on 1/264 of an inch of pressurized water. Visitors may put their hands on the 4-foot diameter ball and spin it in another direction. Or the Merchant Family Memorial (Ripley's Believe It or Not Ball).

Contrary to Popular Belief

[IceCreamGuy (904648)]

Contrary to popular belief, water organizes into layers when compressed into a nano-sized channel.

I can't believe the popular notions of water in a nano-sized channel are false! Soon they'll be saying that the attorney general acts like a solid under pressure in a nano-sized tube. If we can't believe the popular notions of nano-tube water behavior, what can we believe? My life is a lie!

shout out to the late kurt vonnegut

[k3v0 (592611)]

sounds like Ice 9 to me

*

completely random science fiction reference

[wisebabo (638845)]

In Arthur C. Clarke's book "The City and the Stars" later re-released as 'Against the fall of Night", it mentions a slidewalk which was a solid in one dimension but a liquid in the other two. That way, you could walk onto the middle portion and be carried along by the "current" while standing. Still what do expect from a civilization a billion or two years in the future?

Grew up on his science fiction and fact books; "The Promise of Space" was seminal to my interest in space. Unfortunately his (alleged) personal discretions have cast a serious shadow over his legacy.

At the nano scale...

[eno2001 (527078)]

...water is a viscous fluid and could work as a lubricant. Gee. Ya think? I wonder if that's why most living things on Earth are made of... wait for it... WATER! Duh!!! Now let me get back to my project to create snapshot backups of the quantum structure of the universe for disaster recovery before the boss... er... wife gets back. Geez, someone told me Slashdot was the place for geeks. You guys are bush league. - Magrathean Planet Builder

All surface

[Sir Holo (531007)]

Stuff like this is what "nano" is actually about. These guys are probing a layer of water so thin that it is almost all surface, so it doesn't exhibit water's "bulk" behavior.

Think of it this way: In bulk liquid form, almost every molecule of water is surrounded by other water molecules, like in a glass of water. But, if you create a layer of water so thin that most of the molecules do not neighbor water molecules, and instead neighbor other things like a surface or their "tip," new behaviors can be ob

Good to know

[timias1 (1063832)]

Otherwise I might try high diving into a glass of water only a few nanometers deep

Re:PV = NRT . . .

[appleguru (1030562)]

That's for gasses.... The article discusses... water as a liquid, acting as a solid... so no, Pressure (Pa) * Volume (m^3) != # moles * 8.31* T (K) here.

Re:PV = NRT . . .

[treeves (963993)]

Of course, PV=nRT is the ideal gas law, but there is a similar relationship for monolayers -(pi)A = nRT - a 2D analog of the ideal gas law for a layer one molecule thick which is often a liquid on another liquid or on a solid. This is when the monolayer is sparse enough that it acts like a gas, even though it may be comprised of molecules which are liquid at that temperature. Pi in the formula is the film pressure and A is the area. This is not really related to the phenomena described in TFA.

Re:

[treeves (963993)]

That's not supposed to be -pi*A = nRT, but just pi*A = nRT. I should have used a colon instead of a dash.

Well...

[Seoulstriker (748895)]

Is your "girlfriend" a water-bottle?

Re:

[CreatureComfort (741652)]

Petroleum based lubricants last much longer than water based, under continuous usage.

Oh... you hadn't discovered that... so sorry.

Re:

[BashMuttons (1026128)]

Yep..Oil/petroleum-based lubricants have been proven to deteriorate the latex in the condom and aren't safe at all, fyi.

Re:

[xtal (49134)]

Polyurethane condoms are not affected by oil based lubricants.

enjoy!

Re:

[treeves (963993)]

Water != water-based. Typically water-based includes glycerin, polyethylene glycol, or other substances. The viscosity of pure water is much lower than that of water-based lubricants.

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[Deanalator (806515)]

Why is its the only non apostrophized possessive? Strictly adhering to antiquated rules that make no sense kills the natural progression of language

Re:

[SpiritusGladius1517 (929800)]

It's not the only one.

My, mine, your, yours, his, hers, theirs, our, and ours come to mind. None of the posessive pronouns take an apostrophe.

Re:What happens when you learn

[Deadstick (535032)]

Why is its the only non apostrophized possessive?

I think he has hi's possessives right.

rj

Re:

[GnrcMan (53534)]

Actually, there is a good, if obscure reason.

When you add an apostrophe s to the end of a noun, you're creating a contraction of the noun and the possessive pronoun. At least that was the intention when the rule was invented

gnrcman's is a contraction of "grncman his", girl's is a contraction of "girl hers"

So if you were to put the apostrophe in "its" the contraction would be "it its", which is really a bit recursive. :)

Re:

[adrianmonk (890071)]

Why is its the only non apostrophized possessive?

• I -> my
  (I want my MTV)
• you -> your
  (You want your MTV)
• he -> his
  (He wants his MTV)
• she -> her
  (She wants her MTV)
• it -> its
  (It wants its MTV)
• we -> our
  (We want our MTV)
• they -> their
  (They want their MTV)

The pattern of there being no apostrophes among possessive pronouns seems pretty regular to me. It makes a reasonable amount of sense as well. These are all very frequently used words and thus (as you might expec

Re:

[Deanalator (806515)]

Point taken. I still think it's strange that the apostrophe is used in marking the possessive for all nouns except the pronouns. It was an arbitrary decision some guy made one day, with no real sensible basis, so the user confusion is more than understandable. From what I have seen on wikipedia, even top scholars still disagree on apostrophe usage.

I think the bigger issue is that the apostrophe is used to mark omissions and possessiveness. I would be happier if things that sounded the same looked the sa

Re:

[wwillia99 (984401)]

Now we know why the internet is a series of tubes. Thats how they pump the water.