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A New 'Super Ice' Is 10 Times Stronger, Bringing It Close to The Strength of Concrete (sciencealert.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the future-building-materials dept.
Researchers have created a strengthened "BioPykrete" by combining ice with cellulose nanocrystals and a custom protein that binds the plant-based crystals to the ice structure. In small-scale tests, the material was about 10 times stronger than regular ice and absorbed 70 times more energy before breaking. ScienceAlert reports: Instead of wood pulp's larger, disordered fibers, the researchers used cellulose nanocrystals here. Cellulose is the main structural material in plants, and in nanocrystal form, it can act as a microscopic strengthening agent for other materials, including ice -- essentially stopping cracks from spreading easily. The protein used here was called CBM3a-AFPIII, a combination of an antifreeze protein (AFP) and a carbohydrate-binding module (CBM). Its job was to act like glue, keeping the cellulose nanocrystals and ice bonded together.

It's a clever approach, and the researchers think that by tweaking their ingredients and methods, they might be able to improve their 'super ice' even further. "Optimizing solidification kinetics and freezing protocols, alongside developing diverse AFP-CBM variants, could yield even higher-strength composites," write the researchers. Besides further tests of the durability of the material, the researchers are also keen to take a closer look at how cracks propagate through BioPykrete, to confirm that the underlying strengthening mechanisms are what they think they are.

Further down the line, this approach could open up a whole new landscape for materials used in packaging, construction, and more: Using a custom protein to bring two unlikely compounds (ice and cellulose) together. "By bridging the gap between recombinant protein design and structural engineering, we have developed a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world's most extreme environments," write the researchers. The findings have been published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces.

A New 'Super Ice' Is 10 Times Stronger, Bringing It Close to The Strength of Concrete More | Reply

A New 'Super Ice' Is 10 Times Stronger, Bringing It Close to The Strength of Concrete

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  • Paging Kurt Vonnegut... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:32AM (#66373608) Journal

    Meet at the ice-9 kiosk.

  • This will revolutionize igloo construction (Score:5, Funny)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:02AM (#66373632)

    but anyone who has ever fallen on their butt on an ice rink will know that ice is hard.

    Maybe this will be useful on Mars? Article is not clear why this story is significant outside of its niche. We don't normally get obscure materials science papers here.

    • Re:This will revolutionize igloo construction (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @08:59AM (#66373842) Homepage

      It's not about the specific "BioPykrete" example, it's the technique that's interesting: using proteins to bridge dissimilar materials in composites. It's using them in a way that's sort of like how an emulsifier lets you bridge lipophilic and hydrophilic compounds

      Think, say, plastic-ceramic or plastic-metal composites. We can do these today (say, Colorfabb Bronzefill 3d printing filament), but the addition of ceramic or metallic particles makes the material properties generally worse, not better. The plastic just does not bond well to the particles; you have to significantly limit the percentage of metal or ceramic in your mix, and it makes them much harder to work. But what if they *did* bound well? You could easily produce materials with significantly boosted strength, abrasion resistance, etc, but with the low-temperature workability of plastics (note: they'd probably have to be thermoset, not thermoplastic, or low-temperature thermoplastics; proteins have heat survivability limits)

      And why stop at metals and ceramics? You could literally just use "dust", just ordinary mineral dusts (clays, silt, etc) as a bulk filler in plastics, yet instead of ending up with a weaker product than working with pure plastic, you'd end up with a stronger one.

      Maybe you don't even need a plastic. Maybe you can do what they're doing and bridge cellulose to an inorganic material? Then you're *really* operating on waste. Ice has the advantage of a low melting point in this situation, letting you use that component as a fluid - but cellulose can be dissolved in a number of substances, so perhaps you mix a cellulose-protein slurry with metal or mineral powders and then vaporize/recover the solvent?

      Or even forgetting "novel" products, what about conventional composites? If you can bridge high-tensile fibres (such as carbon fibre) better to the polymer matrix that they're in, then you can help eliminate one of the main failure mechanisms of said composites, as well as making the behavior far more predictable. Because like metals (and unlike ceramics), a protein-bridged compound shouldn't be brittle; breaking one bond shouldn't introduce a discontinuity (like a ceramic), it should just reconnect after breakage (like a metal). Such composites should have ductility.

      I don't know how widely applicable this will be, but technology that helps bridge dissimilar compounds is nothing to scoff at. And today we have tools like AlphaFold to assist with the design

      As for the caveats:

      * The concept of coupling agents is also not new, we already use various coupling agents to bond plastic to metal particles in metal-plastic composites and the like - they're just not great at their jobs.

      * The aforementioned temperature limits

      * Potential production challenges (though industrial enzymes are as cheap as like $15-50/kg, so seems viable?)

      * Other coupling agents may offer better advantages; it's not a static field.

      • It's not about the specific "BioPykrete" example, it's the technique that's interesting: using proteins to bridge dissimilar materials in composites.

        What is a big enabler in this process is that the synthesis products needed work fine with the e.coli bacteria they are grown in. So that is a big plus. What remains to be seen is if this can all be done at scale. Not that I'm an expert in this field, but it seems to me that it probably can. Might be useful in the Antarctic.

        • The beauty of growing the chemistry with bugs is the limit to your production is really just the size of your bioreactor, and thats a very much known and solved problem

          • The beauty of growing the chemistry with bugs is the limit to your production is really just the size of your bioreactor, and thats a very much known and solved problem

            Yup. I think the biggest thing will be seeing how this plays out with freezing the new Pycrete in the field. They had pretty controlled (understandably) in the lab. I'm pretty sure it will work though.

            I think, for construction in the antarctic, the whole process can be performed onsite,

      • It's not a new idea, just a more refined version of what they were playing around with in the 1940s. The Brits floated the idea of making huge chunks of the stuff using nothing more than water and wood fibres, then attaching them all together to make a floating landing strip. Essentially an artificial iceberg employed as an aircraft carrier.

    • We don't normally get obscure materials science papers here.

      Yeah, what a waste of space, we could have gotten one more article about AI instead!

    • If it's biodegradable, it'd be good up North for the ice roads.
      Or maybe for lakes that are popular for ice fishing but have a tendency towards weak ice would benefit from this stuff.

    • I was thinking this will revolutionize cocktails.

  • What temp? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bodhammer ( 559311 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:06AM (#66373636)
    At what temp is this useful and how?

    • Re:What temp? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Grimolfr ( 9749826 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @09:59AM (#66373924)
      From the article "The intended application isn't for aircraft carriers this time, but rather for construction projects in remote, cold areas where conventional building methods aren't easy to apply – like the Arctic and Antarctic." - So it's designed specifically for places where it thawing isn't an issue. And likely very useful in those place as it's not like we have infrastructure to make concrete in the Antarctic - and you can't let concrete freeze before it sets or it ruins it which is hard to do in places that are always extermely cold. No shortage of ice though, no danger of it thawing, and if you can make ice stronger than concrete it's likely a much better building material to use in those locations. Might even be useful in space for construction eventually, since all the ice giants have belts of ice around them just waiting to be used.

      • Fine, Arctic or antarctic. I'd like to know any application where the strength of the regular ice is not sufficient. Also, how do they intend to manufacturer it there? I don't see what's the breakthrough here. It is well established that any material can be made stronger by embedded strong fibers in it.

        • They are doing science, not engineering. It's not at all uncommon for scientific discoveries to not be directly linked to an application. But if you don't advance the science, then no new tools for the engieers to use building things. "By bridging the gap between recombinant protein design and structural engineering, we have developed a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world's most extreme environments," write the researchers. And I'd suspect engineers planning to
      • It may not thaw, but ice can sublimate
        • Assuming you don't put a sealant on it to prevent that, or simply bury the structure in snow. When it sublimates directly into water vapor there has to be somewhere for it to go or it just turns right back into ice. That's why your freezer is 'self defrosting' to remove all the water vapor that sublimated in your freezer that then turned into frost on the walls inside the freeezer when it refroze. It's why you have manually defrost your chest freezer, as most of them don't self-defrost as that actually

  • The original Pykrete (Score:5, Informative)

    by alanw ( 1822 ) <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:25AM (#66373646) Homepage

    The original Pykrete [wikipedia.org] was proposed to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt as a material for constructing aircraft carriers during WWII.

  • Can I build my generation spaceship from this? (Score:5, Funny)

    by butt0nm4n ( 1736412 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:39AM (#66373702)

    It consumes the hull as fuel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ediron2 ( 246908 )

      which could make running out of gas mid-journey a doubly-frightening thing.

      • Yes . Make it very big I guess and have a lifeboat inside.

        Maths and physics are not my strengths, but it seems one of the challenges of space are mass and fuel , you want something big to live in and grow food but then you have got to move it and your fuel has mass too.

        If your mass is your fuel, like a human body when it goes into ketosis , that feels efficient, it works for us, we eat to top up our mass, some considerably more than others.

        Frozen H20 has most of the things to sustain life too. Construction

  • One flaw for packaging (Score:3)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:57AM (#66373708)
    Ice has a horrible habit of melting. Don't know if the researchers have considered this yet. I'm happy to be quoted on any future papers.

    • RTFS:

      ...a high-performance material specifically engineered for the rigors of the world's most extreme environments,

      I don't think this material is going to be used over most of this world but it could be useful in, say, Spitzbergen or Antarctica.

      Then there's the Moon, Mars, etc...

    • Ice has a horrible habit of melting. Don't know if the researchers have considered this yet. I'm happy to be quoted on any future papers.

      Don't know if you know it but they did such research during WW2 to build an "aircraft carrier" for north atlantic waters:

      "Pykrete (/pakrit/, PIE-creet)[1] is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).[2]
      During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material for a supersized aircraft carrier for the British Royal Navy. Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relati

      • I hadn't heard of that before that's incredibly cool. Thank you for the link looks like it could be good reading.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

          I hadn't heard of that before that's incredibly cool.

          Ideally, yes, else your aircraft carrier melts.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        Made obsolete (the carrier) by the Consolidated B-24 Liberator's great range, allowing the 'Atlantic Gap' to be closed against U-boats.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by drnb ( 2434720 )

          Made obsolete (the carrier) by the Consolidated B-24 Liberator's great range, allowing the 'Atlantic Gap' to be closed against U-boats.

          WRT the ice carrier, that and escort carriers. The very long range liberator configuration was an important part in closing that gap, but not the entire solution. The escort carriers were also an important part. VLR and CVE complemented each other well.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
            True - Stringbags (Fairey Swordfish) on the escort carriers were important. The Swordfish could operate off them where other more advanced machines would not due to low take off and landing speeds, and they were not at risk from fighters that far from land. Hence they were kept in production, ironically at a Blackburn factory almost as far from the sea as you can get, the Fairey Swordfish having beaten the Blackburn entry for the specification in the 1930s.

    • Would you prefer Doctor liqu1d or just liqu1d?

    • Use dry ice instead, it won't melt.

  • In tension? In compression? In shear? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @08:53AM (#66373836)
    Concrete has wildly varying mechanical characteristics based on the type of stress you put it under. That's why rebar is needed. The title is little more than clickbait, though it's from BeauHD.... so that's no surprise.

    • Concrete has wildly varying mechanical characteristics based on the type of stress you put it under. That's why rebar is needed. The title is little more than clickbait, though it's from BeauHD.... so that's no surprise.

      Tell me you didn't look at TFA without saying you didn't look at TFA. 8^)

      • Tell me you didn't look at TFA without saying you didn't look at TFA. 8^)

        That's easy, just post a comment on Slashdot.

  • As the blurb implies, analogues are not hard to imagine. For example,  "colloidalized" carbon dioxide comes to mind as  "insulating" material for high-temp super-conductors.

  • Stronger is good, but what about impact resistance?

    Maybe combining both approaches could be beneficial.

  • They should make LNG tankers out of this stuff. It would be a perfect application... they already have Cryo coolers for the LNG and they also use the gas to power the ship anyway so there is an infinite energy source to keep the ice cold.

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