An Integrated CALPHAD Tool for Modeling Precipitation Kinetics and Accelerating Materials Design

CALPHAD tools, such as Thermo-Calc and DICTRA, together with related thermodynamic and kinetic databases have now been applied extensively in almost every aspect of materials design, from screening to processing, operating, and recycling. Their success relies on their capability to provide fundamental phase equilibrium and phase transformation information in materials of industrial relevance, which is possible due to the adopted methodology where free energy or atomic mobility of each phase in a multicomponent system is modeled hierarchically from lower-order systems, and model parameters are evaluated by considering both ab-initio and various experimental data. In this presentation, we introduce TC-PRISMA, a new user-friendly computational tool that extends the Thermo-Calc and DICTRA approach with additional interface property data in order to simulate the kinetics of precipitation process. Nucleation and growth models implemented in the software will be presented. Engineering applications of precipitation modeling and ongoing challenges will also be discussed as well.