ИСТИНА

The problem of many Arctic regions, including the Arctic Islands, is the lack of sufficient fresh water. For the autonomous water supply of settlements, a snow harvesting is used. However, in dry winters harvesting snow is ineffective. In addition, melt water contains not enough minerals and trace elements. Intensive economic development of the Russian part of the Arctic led to pollution of rivers and lakes with sewage and industrial water. For cleaning and desalination of large volumes of natural and manmade waters, including for the purposes of water supply, it is necessary to use economic technologies based on application of renewable types of natural energy. It is known that when saline water freezes, it is partially desalinated. However, the method of natural freezing is characterized by low efficiency. To increase the effectiveness of desalination an artificial ice rain can be used, created by long-range sprinkler systems. If the natural ice rain causes great problems for the infrastructure of settlements, the artificial ice rain can be used to clean and desalinate contaminated mineralized waters. Ice shells are forming at freezing water drops, and salts are rejected into the central unfrozen core of the drops. When a drop falls to the ground and the ice shell is destroyed, the unfrozen brine drains out of the drop and is filtered outside a porous ice massif, which significantly reduces the mineralization of the massif. This allows even at the stage of freezing to reduce the mineralization of the porous ice body by an order of magnitude. The remaining brine is removed in the process of melting. Results of a preliminary experimental study on the desalination of saline waters by the method of drip freezing are presented.