Currently as due to the rapid development of industry and increase in population we meet serious problems concerning the shortage and pollution of water. In the country many experts predict a shortage of water approaching 450 million tons by the year 2006. To cope with this serious problem it is necessary to construct desalination plants. In the adoption of a desalination system the most important factor is the cost of fresh water production,. In general LNG is stored in a tank as a liquid state below $-162^{circ}C$. When it is serviced, however the LNG absorbs energy from a heat source and transforms to a high pressure gaseous state. During this process a huge amount of cold energy accumulated in cooling LNG is wasted. This wasted cold energy can be utilized to produce fresh water by using a sea water freezing desalination system. In order to develop a sea water freezing desalination system and to establish its design technique qualitative and quantitative data regarding the freezing behavior of sea water is required in advance, The goals of this study are to reveal the freezing behavior of sea water is required in advance. The goals of this study are to reveal the freezing mechanisms of sea water to measure the freezing rate and to investigate the freezing heat-transfer characteristics,. The experimental results will provide a general understanding of sea water freezing behavior in a rectangular vessel cooled from above.