Calcium Chloride Pellets
You may not be aware of it, but you've probably encountered calcium chloride throughout your day-to-day-life for many years - without even noticing. Frequently used in many industries, food and drink products and medicines, the salt has a variety of important uses that are essential to human life. Possibly calcium chloride's most common use of all, however, is as a road deicer in the winter months - all thanks to its unique ice-melting properties. In this article, we're going to take a closer look at the benefits of the substance, whilst also looking at precisely how it works its magic.
Icy roads and sidewalks are seemingly indestructible when they arrive - albeit uninvited - to towns and cities across the whole of the United States. With this in mind, the role of calcium chloride pellets in allowing us to minimize disruptions caused by heavy snowfall and freezing conditions is an important one.
In basic scientific terms, the 'technology' behind calcium chloride is that, courtesy of its own unique chemical structure, it has the ability to dissolve in water and give off considerable amounts of heat energy. As a result, when pellets of the salt are sprayed onto roads or slippery pathways which have a heavy build-up of snow, it reacts with the water to generate heat which rapidly melts the ice.
To put it into more advanced terminology, the reaction that takes place here is exothermic - meaning heat is given out to the surroundings whilst it's taking place. To its advantage, the calcium chloride also absorbs heat from the surroundings to enable it to melt ice more quickly. These exothermic and endothermic reactions combine and work together to make calcium chloride an excellent deicing agent - unrivaled in terms of its efficiency.
The advantages of calcium chloride as a deicer extend well beyond its high-speed melting of ice, however; beneficially, the salt also stops the water that's produced via the melting process from refreezing again. This eliminates the worry of plummeting temperatures during the night causing a new ice build-up, because cleverly, the substance reduces the freezing point of the water. In some cases, this point of freezing is reduced by as much as 10 degrees: a huge change that can keep roads clear for days to come - regardless of temperature drops.
On the surface, this process sounds relatively straightforward, but the complicated scientific theory behind how it actually works is considerably harder to consolidate. When calcium chloride comes into contact with water, the colligative properties of the liquid undergo drastic transformations. Because water is as a polar solvent, the calcium chloride can dissolve within it to decompose into its ions of calcium and chlorine, which are positive and negative respectively. It's this change that allows the temperature rise to take place.
Explanations aside, calcium chloride ice treatment - despite not being the complete solution - goes a long way in combating a problem which has the ability to put people's lives on hold. With the help of this hugely versatile salt, we can at least begin thinking about eradicating ice and snow on the roads to a degree which allows us to resume living.