The effect of confinement on the solid-liquid phase transitions of water was studied by using DSC and FT-IR measurements. Enthalpy changes upon melting of frozen water in MCM-41 and SBA-15 were determined as a function of pore size and found to decrease with decreasing pore size. The melting point also decreased almost monotonically with a decrease in pore size. Analysis of the Gibbs-Thomson relation on the basis of the thermodynamic data showed that there were two stages of interfacial free energy change after the constant region, i.e., below a pore size of 6.0 nm: a gradual decrease down to 3.4 nm and another decrease after a small jump upward. This fact demonstrates that the simple Gibbs-Thomson relation, i.e., a linear relation between the melting point change and the inverse pore size, is limited to the range not far from the melting point of bulk water. FT-IR measurements suggest that the decrease in enthalpy change and interfacial free energy change with decreasing pore size reflect the similarity of the structures of both liquid and solid phases of water in smaller pores at lower temperatures.

The effect of confinement of an acetonitrile-water mixture, whose correlation length was comparable to the pore size of the mesopores of MCM-41 (d=2.4-3.6 nm), on the phase changes was studied. Used techniques were low temperature differential scanning calorimetry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, where the phase separation, lowering of the freezing and melting temperatures, and phase transitions of the acetonitrile were detected. The latter occurred in the mesopores at temperatures similar to that of the pure liquid, while the melting temperature of the water in the mesopores<3.1 nm decreased markedly at higher acetonitrile contents, suggesting a marked lowering of ice crystallite size.