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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2146 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

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...Has anyone ever heard of attempts to use freezing water to provide mechanical force for metalworking? Making pressings, for example?

I have a metal water bottle which got squashed. I filled it with water and put it in the freezer and it popped back out.

Metalworking? No- despite the popular misconception water and ice are considerably more compressible than essentially all metals. You'd probably want something more along the lines of Dexpan, which when mixed with water can (according to the tech specs) provide 18 ksi of compressive force, which might be enough to form some softer metals like copper or aluminum.

They say that ice is incompressible, but it's only 1/20th as incompressible as steel (9 GPa vs. 200 GPa elastic modulus). I'm not sure how well it would work given that difference.

(The "elastic modulus" of air isn't really a meaningful concept, but if you ignore that then the right number would be 0.0001 GPa, or 100000x as compressible as ice.)

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