BLUF: Ice can be used for more than keeping the beer cold.

One of my fondest memories is of all the cousins at Grandmother’s house on a hot summer afternoon making ice cream. It took three of us to operate the ice cream freezer; one would turn the crank; one would sit on top of the gear box to keep the contraption from turning over; and one would pour in the ice and rock salt as the mixture melted. The cousin who volunteer to sit on the freezer thought they had the best job until the cold got to be just too much for them. They got to take over cranking so they could warm up. LOL.

There were two concepts at work here. The salt dropped the temperature of the ice water mixture and spinning the ice cream can increased the convective heat transfer.

Over the years I have found other uses for an ice and salt mixture some of which are conventional like shrinking a bushing before pressing it into place for a tight interference fit and others being a bit less conventional like quickly chilling down a warm soft drink.

This video that I found on the web from DaveHax demonstrates how effective salted ice water is at chilling down a canned soft drink.  

Had the video demonstration included spinning the can similar to the spinning action of the ice cream freezer it would likely have taken less than 1 minute to chill that drink. Back in college I used to go over to my Dad’s chemistry lab and eat lunch with him. He used to keep a case of room temperature soft drinks in his office and he would quickly chill them by rolling the cans in an ice water bath … No salt added. The action was analogous to a lumberjack rolling a log with the can being the log and his fingers being the legs of the running lumberjack. The rolling action did not shake the contents to any significant degree but it significantly increased the convective heat transfer compared to a can sitting still in the ice water. The warm can rolled for a couple of minutes was chilled sufficiently to satisfy us. Just for grins I need to test what affect adding salt makes. But I have used this trick with straight ice and water many times since my college days and for more than soft drinks 🙂

I am sure there are a lot of other uses for an ice bath in the boating world so please post a comment if you have one. If you liked the post please follow the blog by going to the upper right hand corner of the page and clicking the Follow button.

Boating Lessons Learned: Ice has more uses than just keeping the beer cold.

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