this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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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.
I doubt you could use an RO-like process for that. Aside from the filters needing servicing, you don't really have closed loop RO. You'd have to plumb your appliance.
My reading of this write-up is that they can push the ions in with an electric charge and they'll leave the solution when the charge is removed. The paper says they are able to trigger melting and recrystallization.