Open Calphad
Compiling, running, and applying computational thermodynamics
on Linux, cloud, and Windows
Open Calphad (OC) is a free, open-source implementation of the CALPHAD method, initiated by Bo Sundman and colleagues in 2011. This guide covers everything a graduate researcher needs to compile, install, and use OC on three target platforms, with a searchable catalog of 2,771 binary thermodynamic assessments from the Hallstedt corpus.
What's inside
Three paths, one Makefile
All three target environments — a local Linux workstation, a generic cloud Linux VM, and a Windows machine using WSL2 — converge on the same Ubuntu package list and the same GNU Makefile. The single most important fact to internalize is that Open Calphad is built with a hand-written GNU Makefile, not CMake. The standalone executable is named oc6P, invoked interactively from the directory containing your thermodynamic database files.
First calculation
The Ag-Cu binary phase diagram
The worked example walks through the canonical first CALPHAD calculation — the Ag-Cu binary phase diagram, which has a simple eutectic at approximately 1052 K with a small miscibility gap in the FCC phase on the silver-rich side. The macro that computes it (map1.OCM) is 18 lines long and ships in the repository's examples/macros/ directory.
Database corpus
2,771 binary CALPHAD assessments
The Database Browser on this site indexes the complete Hallstedt corpus — 2,771 binary TDB assessments covering 1,241 unique binary systems across 74 elements, curated by Bengt Hallstedt (RWTH Aachen) and originally published as a benchmark against the Miedema model. All files are CC-BY licensed and downloadable from gotrawama.eu/bengt/.
Use the left sidebar to navigate the 13 sections of the guide. The first three sections cover overview and theory; sections 4–6 cover installation on Linux, cloud, and Windows; sections 7–8 cover the command interface and worked example; and the appendices provide a glossary, exercises, and references.