i like cold beverages
July 6th 2008 12:15 pm
Some time ago I bought these silicone ice cube trays from Ikea. Ice cube tray a very serious misnomer, because the ice that comes out of these things is anything but cubes. But the ice is in fun shapes (I got the arrows and crosses), so it’s a little sad to see that the Ikea PLASTIS line of ice-making molds is no longer in stock (nb: you can still purchase a very similar item from Amazon).
So I’ve been making humorously-shaped ice for quite a while now, and the other day I was torn between using ice arrows or ice crosses to cool my tasty beverage. At this very moment I questioned which shape would cool my drink more quickly. That is, does the ice arrow or the ice cross have more surface area?
It’s a pretty simple problem to solve, and anyone who graduated from Jr. High geometry should be able to figure it out in less than 5 minutes. I present here the precise measurements that are necessary to get the answer. My solution is here (spoiler alert!). I hope you agree.
This train of thought led me to conclude that an ice shape that would cool your drink most quickly would be one with the maximal possible surface area in a given volume. If only someone could engineer a tray that makes ice in the shape of a high-order icosahedron. That would get your drink cold in no time flat. Or better yet, something approaching a fractional dimension, where you’d probably need advanced degrees in math to even predict the cooling effects of such a hypothetical ice shape on a beverage.
That is all.
Jason responded on 06 Jul 2008 at 4:16 pm #
Ice with fractal dimensionality? Like a snowflake? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake
jmizz responded on 08 Jul 2008 at 3:50 am #
trade-off—watered down drinks!
jonathan responded on 29 Jul 2008 at 12:11 pm #
you could always hit the ice with a sledge hammer to increase it’s surface area. =)
i wonder if the ice tray engineers specifically tried to get these ice shapes to have similar surface areas so that they’d behave similarly for all party goers.
in college a, couple friends had the “+” trays and also the ones that look like discs with holes in the center, annular extrusions. the outer annular diameter of the ice shape was just a hair smaller then the inner diameter of the main cylinder on their upright water-filtered smoking apparatus. although i’m a non-smoker, i could still take pride in their discovery; it looked really neat.
Melissa T. G. responded on 11 Nov 2009 at 12:31 am #
I got in an argument w/ my boyfriend about almost the same problem. I was thinking of it in a similar way to what you were talking about, except I wanted to SLOW the melting of the ice (thus the watering down of the drink), in order to keep the drink cool for the longest time for the least wateriness factor. Based on sipping iced coffee over a number of hours on a warm day. Our ice cubes, btw, are spheres, which I think are best and also awesome. A little hard to make, though.
Aubrey didn’t think it was so obvious that spheres perform better. Part of his counter-argument was that as the ice melts, its surface area to volume ratio is changing based on the reduction of volume but also on the fact that the shape is getting less edge-y (reducing fractal dimension, in your terms). I still think I’m right, but I’m less sure I can prove it. The melting of the surface area has the biggest impact on the temperature of the liquid bc of the state change (latent heat gains), but as the ice sits there (since it can be