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Cold Production: Creating Concrete Components Using Formworks Made of Ice

By Architecture and Digital Fabrication students at ETH Zuric

By Rain Noe - February 22

in Manufacturing

Re-surfacing ice rinks creates a lot of extra ice. Students at ETH Zurich in the Master in Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication program found a creative way to use this excess ice with their Cold Production project.

"Cold Production explores a zero-waste fabrication method for concrete that uses digitally sculpted ice as a moulding material. The project explored spatial concrete lattices and their stacking principles. Ice units were press-formed using 3D-printed multiparty moulds."

"The rapid and waste-free production is done in the Sub-Zero lab at -10C. The concrete was poured, cured, and the next day the elements were placed outdoors for demoulding by simply letting ice melt away, revealing its intricate concrete lattice design."

"The fabrication of the 15 unique lattice modules required the processing of 8400 kg of ice. For such a large scale of production, the raw material was sourced from a local ice rink. Ice abrasion is a common by-product of the regular resurfacing of the ice rinks. The reuse of ice for fabrication purposes allows an increase in the production speed and dramatically minimizes the energy consumption of the process."

"The intertwined geometries of the concrete elements were assembled in a continuous structure. Based on the [earlier research project] Ice Formwork, this project opens the potential of ice to cast concrete in topologically challenging forms."

Here's video of the Cold Production process:

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Cold Production was done in collaboration with architecture firm Digital Building Technologies.

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Comments

Brian Drake

9 months ago

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It's like lost foam casting for concrete. Wonder how the cold of the ice impacts the structural integrity of the concrete?

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Héctor Marchesi

9 months ago

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I like this out of the box solution, although I wouldn't say it is a zero-waste solution. It states the ice melts away, so you would be actually losing water, although if they can recapture it and reuse it is something not stated in the article.

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- Anthony Towers
  
  Héctor Marchesi
  
  8 months ago
  
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  Also, they cost of energy to freeze and keep frozen the mould as the concrete sets.
  Concrete does put out some heat as it sets too, maybe thats why the casting look so rough
  
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Alan Nomoto

9 months ago

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Very cool & out of the box solution!

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