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  • Putting salt on roads to prevent ice from forming is a common example of this in action.

    A better example: lots of people use salt to force the ice to melt, to chill their beer faster. It's the exact same principle as in the article.

    The main issue is entropy - it's hard to remove the salt off the liquid, to make it a solid again, if you want a continuous process. But perhaps if you use a "brine" vs. pure liquid, reverse osmosis could do the trick?

    The second issue is that you need to work with a rather specific range of temperatures; make it too high and the liquid won't become solid again, make it too low and it won't melt even if you add the salt. This could be also solved by "bootstrapping" the process with the older HFC-based one, you're still reducing HFC usage this way albeit not completely.

13 comments