Pykrete
Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice.
Geoffrey Pyke managed to convince Lord Mountbatten of the potential of his proposal (actually prior to the invention of pykrete) sometime around 1942, and trials were made at two locations in Alberta, Canada.
It was by Herman Mark, my former professor of physical chemistry in Vienna, who had lost his post there when the Nazis overran Austria and found a haven at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
Mark and his assistant, Walter P. Hohenstein, stirred a little cotton wool or wood pulp—the raw material of newsprint—into water before they froze it, and found that these additions strengthened the ice dramatically.
Combined Operations requisitioned a large meat store five floors underground beneath Smithfield Market, which lies within sight of St. Paul's Cathedral, and ordered some electrically heated suits, of the type issued to airmen, to keep us warm at less than 0 °C (32 °F) temperatures.
The experiments of Perutz and his collaborators in Smithfield Meat Market in the City of London took place in great secrecy behind a screen of animal carcasses.
[9] Despite these tests, the main Project Habakkuk was never put into action because of limitations in funds and the belief that the tides of the war were beginning to turn in favour of the Allies using more conventional methods.
[10] According to the memoirs of British General Ismay: A good deal of consideration, much of it highly technical, was also given to the feasibility of building floating platforms which could either be used by fighters to support opposed landings until such time as airfields ashore were available, or act as staging points for ferrying aircraft over long distances.
The idea as originally conceived by a member of Combined Operations staff, and vehemently supported by Mountbatten, was that these floating platforms should be constructed out of icebergs.
However, new concepts for pykrete crop up occasionally among architects, engineers and futurists, usually regarding its potential for mammoth offshore construction or its improvement by applying super-strong materials such as synthetic composites or Kevlar.
[12] Since pykrete needs to be preserved at or below freezing point, and tends to sag under its own weight at temperatures above −15 °C (5 °F), an alternative was considered that would guarantee effectiveness and public safety.
[7] In 2011, the Vienna University of Technology successfully built a pykrete ice dome, measuring 10 metres (33 ft) in diameter in the Austrian village of Obergurgl.
[13] Researcher Johann Kollegger of Vienna University of Technology thinks his team's alternative new method is easier, avoiding icy sprayback onto the workers.
The MythBusters vessel did not contain refrigeration units to keep the pykrete frozen as the original plans called for, and the boat had a much thinner construction than the massive ships proposed in World War II.
In the same year, the story of Pyke and pykrete in the Second World War also played an important role in Giles Foden's book Turbulence, about a (fictitional) British meteorologist and his contributions to D-Day weather forecasting.
All four presenters, Jem Stansfield, Dallas Campbell, Liz Bonnin, and Yan Wong, had to be rescued from Portsmouth Harbour after the boat took on water through the engine mounts.
[18] 99% Invisible's third volume of mini-stories podcasts includes an article about Project Habbakuk and the creation, proposal, and eventual scrapping of pykrete as a useful building material during WWII.
[19] Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur Youtube episode "Colonizing Ceres" describes the fictional use of pykrete to construct a dome habitat on an asteroid to be mined.
