ESPEI, or Extensible Self-optimizing Phase Equilibria Infrastructure, is a tool for automated thermodynamic database development within the CALPHAD method.
The ESPEI package is based on a fork of pycalphad-fitting and 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. Single-phase and multi-phase fitting methods are described in Chapter 3 of Richard Otis's thesis.
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).
The name and idea of ESPEI are originally based off of Shang, Wang, and Liu, ESPEI: Extensible, Self-optimizing Phase Equilibrium Infrastructure for Magnesium Alloys Magnes. Technol. 2010 617–622 (2010).
ESPEI is MIT licensed. See LICENSE.