chornedsnorkack - 28-8-2015 at 23:47
A lot of substances react with water exothermically.
But ice has a substantial latent heat of melting.
Can you list reagents which react with water exothermically enough to melt ice and have heat left over?
deltaH - 29-8-2015 at 03:09
There is probably a very large number of substances that will react with ice exothermically.
Aluminium-ice sticks out as it's the basis of the ALICE propellant from which you can even build a rocket 
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVP4VX2w4VA
szuko03 - 29-8-2015 at 11:25
That ALICE propellant seems very interesting. They need to make the Al even finer! I know how ridiculously small that is, actually its to small for me
to picture however I think if they made it even smaller it would probably burn even better. How do you even get things that fine anyway?
TheAlchemistPirate - 29-8-2015 at 12:44
I wonder what the ratio of Al to Ice is. It would be interesting to test it this winter with snow and pyro aluminum...
careysub - 29-8-2015 at 22:55
An interesting side note: did you know that it is theoretically possible to have a super-cooled water detonation?
The reaction product driving the detonation shock is ice and it exactly fits the technical criteria of detonations.
I don't know if this has ever been observed, all detonations require a certain scale ("minimum diameter") and for an supercooled water detonation it
would be tens of meters, at least.
Perhaps on one of the "water worlds" they have been detecting recently, you might have freezing/thaw cycles with the formation of lakes or seas of
super-cooled water (since there is no land on the planet, there is no dust to act as nucleating agents) that freeze suddenly with a "bang".