ESPEI, or Extensible Self-optimizing Phase Equilibria Infrastructure, is a tool for automated thermodynamic database development within the CALPHAD method. It uses pycalphad for calculating Gibbs free energies of thermodynamic models.

The implementation for ESPEI involves first fitting single-phase data by calculating parameters in thermodynamic models that are linearly described by the single-phase input data. Then Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to optimize the candidate models from the single-phase fitting to multi-phase zero-phase fraction data. The benefit of this approach is the automated, simultaneous fitting for many parameters that yields uncertainty quantification, as shown in Otis and Liu High-Throughput Thermodynamic Modeling and Uncertainty Quantification for ICME. Jom 69, (2017). Single-phase and multi-phase fitting methods are described in Chapter 3 of Richard Otis’s thesis.

ESPEI is free, opwn-source, MIT licensed tool. If you use it for work presented in a publication, we ask that you cite the following publication:

B. Bocklund, R. Otis, A. Egorov, A. Obaied, I. Roslyakova, Z.-K. Liu, ESPEI for efficient thermodynamic database development, modification, and uncertainty quantification: application to Cu–Mg, MRS Commun. (2019) 1–10. doi:10.1557/mrc.2019.59.