If you care about creep, ice at −20 C shouldn’t have >1 MPa on it.
So what is your criterion for caring about creep? How does it vary with temperature? From the limited reading I have done it looks like you basically eliminate creep in practice at −100°C and you can put something like 30MPa on ice.
But I am not clear how sawdust/fiber affects this.
Here is a paper with “concrete” that has 800 MPa compressive.
Sure, but this material is presumably impractical. Practical, cheap concrete seems to be in this 20-40 MPa bracket.
But really, I don’t think this idea is particularly limited by the compressive strength of ice. I think the biggest threat is creep of the ice under load, and the difficulty of making an upper layer that covers the ice with good strength and also low thermal conductivity, and is also cheap at huge scale. I think it’s doable but it looks like this is the hard part.
So what is your criterion for caring about creep? How does it vary with temperature? From the limited reading I have done it looks like you basically eliminate creep in practice at −100°C and you can put something like 30MPa on ice.
But I am not clear how sawdust/fiber affects this.
Sure, but this material is presumably impractical. Practical, cheap concrete seems to be in this 20-40 MPa bracket.
But really, I don’t think this idea is particularly limited by the compressive strength of ice. I think the biggest threat is creep of the ice under load, and the difficulty of making an upper layer that covers the ice with good strength and also low thermal conductivity, and is also cheap at huge scale. I think it’s doable but it looks like this is the hard part.