Strengthening of Ice Composites with Cellulose and Inorganic Nanoparticles

The development of the Arctic needs more and more materials for the construction of roads, crossings, bridges, portside unloading sites, and buildings for various purposes. In view of the obvious difficulties and high cost of delivering traditional building materials (cement, concrete, steel, wood) to places of use in the Arctic, there is a great desire to replace them with local environmentally friendly geomaterials from renewable sources. The raw materials for such materials can be water, ice, sand, gravel, and alluvium. Ice, as one of the most accessible building materials in cold regions, has many advantages, but has a number of significant drawbacks: low strength, brittleness, and a tendency to creep. Attempts to overcome these drawbacks with the help of reinforcement with macrocomponents (logs, branches, shavings, sawdust, gravel, sand) have shown the limited potential of such a strategy. The results of strengthening of fresh ice at the nanoscale and microscale levels by nanoparticles of cellulose, SiO₂, and ZrO₂, are presented. It is shown that the optimal concentration of the filler (1–3 wt %) can provide more than sixfold strengthening of the ice composite compared to pure ice and an increase in the energy of fracture by more than an order of magnitude.