Crushing strength of Ice

[denise01]

does any one have a figure for the crushing strenght of ice as it expands.

[brachiopod]

Tortional, compressional or tensile?

Newtons, Pascals or pounds?

[mibn2cweus]

Search: Water Expansion Pressure

Ice expansion pressure varies with temp below freezing analogous to steam pressure but in reverse.

[Calvesy]

Sorry to actually give you an answer, Denise, but ice has a density of about 8% less that water. When it melts, say in you pipe going to the tap in you garden shed it tries to expand by this 8%. As you know from hydraulic machines, liquids resist compression.

In the case of water an 8% compression would be resisted by a pressure of 2 tons per square centimetre. You'd need an ocean 20km deep to exert that pressure. This is 2000 times atmospheric pressure.

[mibn2cweus]

Since ice has a lower density than water (ice floats) it attempts to expand in volume relative to liquid water. If this expansion is opposed by a confined space a lower temperature, in proportion to the opposition presented, is required to change water from liquid to solid (ice).

[mibn2cweus]

Approximately 1 ton, per square inch, per degree Centigrade below zero.

[Gef]

Sorry Calvesy, but when ice melts the water produced at 0C occupies a smaller volume than the ice. It is the ice forming that bursts pipes, not the ice melting.

[Kingaroo]

I'm imagining a great murder mystery here, where a victim is trapped inside a container full of water and as it freezes and expands his body is crushed agains tht eside of the tank. Of course he would have already frozen to death or drowned, but the crushing of the corpse is a mystery to investigators because the ice has melted by the time they find the body. And the temperature has made it hard to deduce time of death.