The main objective of this paper is to present a model for the heat transfer in the case of the melting of saline binary solution. This model is applied to calorimetry in order to determine the kinetics of the eutectic melting. The investigated cell containing the solution is a cylinder of a few mm 3 in volume. By simulation, we could replicate the shape of the experimental thermogramms. The validation of the model permits determining some parameters which are inaccessible due to the small size of the cell, like the space-time evolution of the temperature inside the differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) sample. (C) 2005 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.