Water Fundamentals As The Basis For Understanding The Environment And Promoting Technology

Water: Fundamentals as the Basis for Understanding the Environment and Promoting Technology

Water: fascinating in all its phases, forms and states of aggregation. Without it, life as we know it would not exist on Earth, for as Paracelsus stated in the 16th century: “water is the matrix of the world and of all its creatures”. While it may appear to be a simple molecule, there is still much about it which is not fully understood. What is notably lacking is a microscopically-based understanding of the reasons for the many anomalous properties of water. This book presents lectures from the Enrico Fermi summer school ‘Water: fundamentals as the basis for understanding the environment and promoting technology’ held in Varenna, Italy, in July 2013. The aim of the school was to offer a glimpse of the many questions that remain unanswered about this molecule, and topics covered included: water in relation to other liquids, biological water, local environment of water protons, atmospheric water, amorphous solid phases of water, NMR studies of water, spectroscopic studies of water, the structure of liquid water, and supercooled water, among others. While this list is by no means exhaustive or complete, it is wide enough to provide a solid basis to young researchers in the field, and the book will be a valuable source of reference for students and all those with an interest in the properties of this fascinating substance.

Water

The Attribute of Water

This book features the latest advances and future trends in water science and technology. It also discusses the scientific popularization and quantitative resolution of a variety of mysterious properties of water and ice from the perspective of hydrogen-bond cooperativity in response to stimuli such as chemical contamination, electrification, magnetification, mechanical compression, molecular undercoordination, and thermal excitation. Anomalies include the floating of ice, the Hofmeister effect in solutions, regelation of ice, slipperiness of ice, water’s tough skin, the Mpemba paradox, and the floating bridge. It also addresses the superfluidity of microchannels, hydrogen bond potentials, nanodroplet and bubble thermodynamics, quasisolidity and supersolidity, controlling superhydrophobicity–superhydrophilicity transition, and high-pressure ice formation. The target audience for this book includes students, senior scholars, engineers and practitioners in the area of physical chemistry, biology, as well as aqueous and colloid solutions.