FAQ

What units does pycalphad use?

  • All units are SI units.

  • Molar quantities are used for state variables, e.g. energy has units J/mol.

  • Composition and site occupancies are mole fractions.

Is any parallelism supported in pycalphad?

pycalphad does not support parallelization out of the box since version 0.8, however it is possible to use pycalphad in parallel via packages such as dask.

How long should equilibrium calculations take?

Roughly speaking, single point equilibrium calculations should take on the order of 200ms.

The binplot and ternplot functions construct phase diagrams by a dense grid of point calculations over the conditions passed. The phase diagrams are mapped by the tieline points of the two phase regions, so unless there are two phase regions in a very small composition range, only coarse composition grids are required for phase diagram calculations.

TypeError: argument is not an mpz during a calculation

This bug should now be fixed. Please update to pycalphad 0.7.1 or later.

RecursionError during a calculation

This bug should now be fixed. Please update to pycalphad 0.7.1 or later.

Text is sometimes cut off when saving figures

Occasionally when saving images with the matplotlib function plt.savefig, axis titles and legends are cut off.

This can be fixed:

  • Per function call by passing bbox_inches='tight' keyword argument to plt.savefig

  • Locally by running import matplotlib as mpl; mpl.rcParams['savefig.bbox'] = 'tight'

  • Permanently by adding savefig.bbox : tight to your matplotlibrc file.