Gas-storage ice grown from water containing microbubbles

Gas-storage ice is the ice that contains various functional gas pores, and can be produced by freezing water in which a desired gas is dissolved. In this conventional method, however, the gas content in the ice is limited by the gas solubility in water. To overcome this limitation, we developed a method to produce gas-storage ice from water in which microbubbles of a desired gas are dispersed, and then obtained images of the structural features of pores formed in the ice prepared using this microbubble method. The images clarified the interaction between a microbubble arriving at an ice–water interface and an existing pore already formed in the ice. The air content in ice prepared using the microbubble method was higher than that prepared using the conventional method, and was about three times higher than the solubility of air in water.