Water Freezing and Ice Melting
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Updated: Mar 29, 2026

Ice Generation and the Heat and Mass Transfer Phenomena of Introducing Water to a Cold Bath of Brine
Published on: March 13, 2017
1Department of Chemistry, Boston University , Boston, Massachusetts 02215-2521, United States.
Abstract:
The generalized replica exchange method (gREM) is designed to sample states with coexisting phases and thereby to describe strong first order phase transitions. The isobaric MD version of the gREM is presented and applied to the freezing of liquid water and the melting of hexagonal and cubic ice. It is confirmed that coexisting states are well-sampled. The statistical temperature as a function of enthalpy, TS(H), is obtained. Hysteresis between freezing and melting is observed and discussed. The entropic analysis of phase transitions is applied and equilibrium transition temperatures, latent heats, and surface tensions are obtained for hexagonal ice ↔ liquid and cubic ice ↔ liquid with excellent agreement with published values. A new method is given to assign water molecules among various symmetry types. Pathways for water freezing, ultimately leading to hexagonal ice, are found to contain intermediate layered structures built from hexagonal and cubic ice.
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