Ever wondered why a forgotten champagne bottle bursts after a night in the freezer? While the expansion of water during freezing certainly plays a major role, one might expect it to be easier to push the cork out than to shatter the glass.
In the January edition of the Dutch Magazine for Physics (NTvN), Menno Demmenie contributed a popular science article based on his recent publication in Scientific Reports [1]. The magazine also covered our latest work on 3D-printing ice at room temperature, facilitated by evaporative cooling in a vacuum chamber. Due to the enormous amount of latent heat extracted during evaporation, small droplets freeze within a fraction of a second after being sprayed into the vacuum. This novel technique is now being utilized by our group to create scaffold-free and curved structures, with high potential for microfluidics, tissue engineering, and potentially printing in outer space where vacuum conditions are naturally met [2].
In addition to these contributions, the magazine’s cover picture features our icicle research. By adding methylene blue, we were able to investigate the wetting properties of growing icicles. We identified this as the driving force behind the morphological instability that creates the characteristic ribbed pattern on the ice surface [3].
References
[1] Demmenie, Menno, et al. “Damage due to ice crystallization.” Scientific Reports 15.1 (2025): 2179.
[2] Demmenie, Menno, Stefan Kooij, and Daniel Bonn. “An Ice Christmas Tree: Fast Three-Dimensional Printing of Ice Structures via Evaporative Cooling in Vacuum.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.14580 (2025)..
[3] Demmenie, Menno, et al. “Growth and form of rippled icicles.” Physical Review Applied 19.2 (2023): 024005.