> It turns out, yes! What happens is that when the salt is added some of the ice melts – pulling heat from the system – until the temperature has reached the new, lower equilibrium point.
Correction, or addendum here: the actual dissolution of the salt is an endothermic process, so even if there was no ice, the temperature of water decreases when salt is dissolved.
>Correction, or addendum here: the actual dissolution of the salt is an endothermic process, so even if there was no ice, the temperature of water decreases when salt is dissolved.
That's technically true, but it's a rather negligible amount.
Salt has an enthalpy of dissolution of +3.9kJ/mol (1) and a molar mass of 58.44g/mol (2), for roughly 67J/g.
For comparison, water=ice has an enthalpy of fusion of 334J/g (3), and you'll be adding at least three times more ice than salt (as max salt concentration is around 25% g/g (4) ). When you take this into account, it's a whole order of magnitude of difference, so for practical purposes you can outright ignore the heat being consumed by the dissolution of the salt.
But which has a greater effect on removing heat from the cream-containing vessel: the decrease in temperature from the dissolution of salt, or the more efficient thermal coupling to the vessel provided by the salt/ice slurry (versus the original solid ice chunks)?
The goal is to remove heat from the cream faster than the system as a whole warms up due to room temperature. I thought the value of salt was to help the cream win that race by making a better heat sink.
If the primary benefit of adding salt was improving thermal coupling through liquid by melting some of ice then you could achieve the same effect by adding some tap water. Which in my opinion would be a lot simpler and less messy than getting salt involved. Some energy would be lost to cool down tap water, but as mentioned in the article phase transition takes a lot more energy than changing temperature of water.
If you had really cold ice cubes, already tightly packed, then the water you add would freeze, making a solid ice sheath around the cream-containing vessel, and yes, that would work great.
But with too much space around the ice cubes, or ice cubes that aren't cold enough, adding water will just give you more cold (but not freezing) water.
I think people have converged on adding salt to ice because it's so forgiving (for a variety of ice cube temperatures and geometries), and the salt itself doesn't appreciably heat anything (unlike your added water). Other comments here quantify this better than I can.
Presumably that is less significant a drop than the equilibrium melting freezing point being 5 degrees lower as even if endothermic it won’t be much will it and will just return back up when you add the warmer mixture bowl?
Correction, or addendum here: the actual dissolution of the salt is an endothermic process, so even if there was no ice, the temperature of water decreases when salt is dissolved.