US Army Researchers Explore Frozen Construction via 3D Printed Ice “Dollhouse”

A team of US Army researchers from the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has used a modified ceramic 3D printer to construct a toaster-sized structure made from liquid nitrogen. The successful demonstration of ice additive manufacturing (AM) was accomplished at New Hampshire’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), towards the objective of assessing the potential of deploying ice as a construction material.

Exploration into 3D printed ice is still relatively scant, but projects from several different institutions, involving a variety of methods, have popped up over the years. Members of the CRREL team have previously published results of research into an ice bridge constructed with spray deposition in the journal Cold Regions Science and Technology. 

The approach that the CRREL researchers have developed combines water with tiny cellulose fibers that reinforce the final object. Having completed what they refer to as a “dollhouse-sized” structure — which took seven hours to print — the team now plans to leverage the same principles to build a “doghouse-sized” ice structure with a larger printer.

In a press release, Kiera Thompson Towell, one of the material engineers who worked on the project, said, “We sought to utilize ice and snow as abundant natural resources in these regions that can be leveraged for construction of expeditionary structures, those that are temporary. Developing a method for 3D printing using ice and snow would allow for automated construction of various customizable structures depending on location and need, while reducing the amount of construction materials that would need to be transported to those regions.”

Towell told Lexi Krupp, a reporter for Vermont Public, that the primary challenge with ice 3D printing is, “Having it be liquid enough that it can flow through your nozzle, and then having it be solid enough that once it’s extruded, it hold its shape before it freezes.”

While the Army researchers are interested in using 3D printed ice as a construction material in remote, cold areas, the first thing I thought of when I saw this story was the potential for 3D printed ice as a tool for data center cooling. There is rising interest in cryogenic applications for data center cooling, and in fact a 2021 research paper describes the use of liquid nitrogen AM to cool high powered GPUs.

On the other hand, liquid nitrogen is costly and dangerous, severely limiting its scalability for the data center market. By utilizing water and pulp, the novel technique that the CRREL team has come up with could accomplish the same goals at a lower cost, and with much less environmental impact.

Additionally, the same rationale driving the team to explore ice as a construction material — providing assistance to remote, cold regions — would be relevant for the same reasons in a data center context. It’s easy to imagine this research branching out into the exploration of its applicability for small modular data centers in areas like Alaska.

Images courtesy of US Army Engineers/DVIDS