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When pushed into the smallest of cracks, water can be used in unexpected ways. A new battery-like device that relies on tiny amounts of water confined within layers of clay could eventually offer sustainable power in places as extreme as Mars.

at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and his colleagues built the聽supercapacitor,聽a type of battery-like energy storage device,聽with components similar to those of conventional batteries, including two electrodes, one with a negative and one with a positive charge. But instead of making these electrodes out of metal, they used the carbon-based material graphene. And instead of filling the space between them with a lithium salt solution, they used clay and water.

The clay layers are full of microscopic channels that are only about a nanometre thick 鈥� and filling those channels with pure water made the liquid behave in a special way. From their past experiments, the researchers knew that the confined water made a great 鈥渨orking fluid鈥�, the material that creates a separation between opposite charges as those particles move between the two electrodes. That separation is what enables the supercapacitor to store energy. As they hoped, it stored 1.6 volts and was able to be charged and drained 60,000 times without losing efficiency.

鈥淚t鈥檚 surprising that you can make a battery out of just water and clay. Like I tell my students, water in very, very small pores is really not water, it鈥檚 like it鈥檚 some other material,鈥� says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. He says that because the new device does not require costly and scarce materials like lithium it could be an exciting future technology.

Artemov says he and his team made the new design as simple as possible, which they hope will help it become broadly used 鈥� even beyond Earth. They have already analysed a variety of types of clay that exist on Mars and found them viable for their supercapacitor.

鈥淭he first industrial revolution was driven by water because of the steam engine. Maybe we can now, by appreciating water at the nanoscale, drive a small revolution too,鈥� says at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, part of the research team.