[TheMonkMan]

Hi Guys,

I'm not a chem-engineer or a rocket scientist, but would like to know some info about water solidification and thought a forum like this would be the right place to ask about it.

Hopefully I'm in the right subforum here?

So here goes, I want to be able to solidify water, without having to freeze it. So the water must stay at room temperature, let's say, 25 degrees celcius, but become a solid with a hardness of more than 1.5 Mohs (seems to be the average hardness of mineral ice at 0 degrees celcius)

So I'd like to know, is there a chemical that can solidify/glue/harden water OR another cheaply available liquid in 25-40 degrees celcius temperature without the need of constant adding of more chemicals? And having a hardness of more than 1.5 Mohs.

I've read about Sodium Polyacrylate and it's not what I'm looking for, it absorbs the water but creates a powder, not one single solid.

Regards,
Brian

[Hunter2]

There not a kind of this stuff. Water get solid at normal conditions at 0 ° C = 32 ° F. You have to look other way around to get a chemical to get hard by adding water. Some component for reactive resins maybe work.

[Intanjir]

Gels come to mind since a small amount of gelling agent can seemingly solidify a large amount of water.

Having even a modest mohs hardness in a gel that was mostly water would be unusual. The water is actually still liquid in a gel and so free to flex, and the gel skeleton is likely flexible as well and you will have a compliant solid like jello or rubber. Even if the gel skeleton is somehow made extremely rigid this should simply result in a brittle gel that is easy to scratch since there is so little actual solid matter in the skeleton to support a load.


Rather than a gel a more conventional material where everything is in the solid phase could be hard but is difficult due to freezing point depression. The substance would essentially have to form an interesting solid compound with water at some discrete ratio. Normally we call these things hydrates. A good example of a highly hydrated crystal would be Glauber's salt. However by weight it is less than half water due to being a salt with a rather heavy anion. This is fairly typical of highly hydrated salts. Magnesium Chloride is an example of a less hydrated salt but which nevertheless holds somewhat more water for its weight. Sodium Sulfide Nonahydrate had the best ratio among things I could find with a casual search.

In chemical jargon you might look at highly hygroscopic substances which are not deliquesent.

[TheMonkMan]

Thanks for the info guys.

If I could fill in the blanks a bit here and why I am asking this, I live in Africa, in a place where it gets rather hot, in summer, our average temperature is 33 degrees celcius, hitting up to 45 on certain days.

Now, I've recently found a love for ice skating, which obviously isn't something we can find just anywhere here. In the country I live, there exists only one, tiny, ice rink. The costs for keeping the ice frozen is quite extreme, having the actual freezer unit and 10 massive aircons running day and night to keep the ice frozen.

There is an alternative, called synthetic ice, but it's not ice at all, it is instead a high-density plastic, which is horrible.

So I'm looking for some insight from a chemical-view, if there even exists another possible solution, a sort of cheap-ish resin, something that could solidify into an ice substitute, which does not need such extreme cooling.

I am not looking at only water, but any cheapish liquid that could solidify like this. Obviously water with an additive would be the cheapest solution, but as has been said, it seems this does not exist just yet.

Much appreciate your inputs guys.

Regards,
Brian

[Ballistic]

So basically, you want to lay down a chemical that will act like ice. Sodium Acetate Trihydrate came to mind, I'm not saying it would work or is hard enough, just a random thought. The trouble is, you'd be skating in a rink made of chemical. Have you thought about the hazards involved?

Check this: http://www.google.co.uk/patents/WO2009130537A1?cl=en