AI helps crack salt water ’s curious electrical properties

Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water’s electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields—including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out exactly why this happens, using state-of-the-art computer simulations bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI). “This is a fundamental property of water and one can finally do a calculation in which this can be entirely predicted from first principles,” says Roberto Car, a physicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. The AI-aided approach should allow physicists to probe in other settings, he says, such as batteries and fuel cells. Conductors and insulators respond differently to an electric field. In a conductor, such as a metal, electrical charges can flow freely, so an applied electric field will, effectively, push positive charges to one side and negative charges to the other. Just enough charges will move to produce an electric field that cancels the applied one, leaving no field inside the conductor. In a perfect insulator, charges can’t move, so the electric field permeates the material. However, most insulators aren’t perfect, and their charges can move a bit. The applie...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news