Physicists from Austria has created the most pure drop of water

Physicists from Austria has created the most pure drop of water

MOSCOW, 24 Aug — RIA Novosti. Austrian scientists have created the purest water in the world, learning to grow microscopic “icicles” in a complete vacuum, and found a strange impurity in ordinary water. A “recipe” for their production was published in the journal Science.

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Even the purest samples of air, water and other fluids contain a large number of impurities, bacteria and viruses. They do not interfere with human life and other living creatures, but such “pollutants”, as shown by experiments, can severely alter the course of chemical reactions and interfere with the learning of new physical and chemical properties of different molecules and materials.

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Diebold accidentally opened some of the unusual contaminants, in fact always present even in the purest water, studying the properties of titanium dioxide, the major component of white paint, coatings, solar panels and some catalysts.

This substance, long known as chemists and physicists, is able to purify water and other liquid environment of organic pollutants, producing oxygen and other aggressive molecules under illumination with sunlight or a UV lamp. Diebold and her team tried to understand why this is happening, observing the interactions of microscopic drops of ultra-pure and “dirty” water and plates of titanium dioxide.

These experiments led to unexpected results. After turning off the lamp on the surface of the plate having the film of unknown nature, and this happened during experiments with dirty and clean water.

By studying its chemical composition, the Austrian researchers found that it consists of formic and acetic acid, connected in nanostructures of a special shape.

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Trying to figure out where did these molecules, scientists drew attention to the fact that they conducted experiments and produced pure water is not in a complete vacuum, and in the presence of air. This led them to assume that she and the other organic acid could fall in drops from the atmosphere.

To test this idea, the Austrian physicists came up with an ingenious methodology for the production of ultrapure water in a complete vacuum. To do this, they created a small sealed chamber, the ceiling of which was attached a thick metal needle. Cool it to extremely low temperatures, physics let water vapor in a vessel that led to the formation of icicles on the tip of the needle.

Removing the remains of the gas, the scientists raised the temperature in the chamber, causing the icicle turned into water. She fell to the plate of titanium dioxide, which physics is placed under the needle.

This allowed Diebold and her colleagues to ensure that will there be any changes in the behavior of water and catalyst.

This time no tape not emerged that both confirmed suspicions physicists and forced them to think about a new mystery — where the air contains such a large number of these acids, and why, as demonstrated by the subsequent experiments of the physicists, their concentration is not different in different parts of the world? The answer to this question is no, the scientists conclude.

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