Today’s state-of-the-art Finite Element (FE) tools tend to use relatively simplified materials descriptions using handbook values that might have little dependence on chemistry or even temperature. Thermo-Calc has spent the last few years developing new models to predict thermophysical material properties to incorporate with CALPHAD-based materials descriptions. The properties have been widely used to extract CALPHAD-based materials data for use in dedicated FEM codes, and the addition has laid the foundation for our development of a completely integrated tool to simulate Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes. The AM Calculator is recently updated and it gives a unique possibility to address the problem of solidification during AM, where we obtain a unified treatment of both process parameters and chemistry-dependent thermophysical properties when solving the multi-physics problem of a moving heat source that melts and solidifies metal powder. The updated Scheil calculator allows for pre-generating a solidification profile, now also including evaporation properties, that can be saved into your own materials library, or used directly as input to the AM Calculator.

Examples of the AM module applied to laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processing of High Entropy Alloys are shown. The respective thermodynamic calculations on the solidification behaviour (Scheil) and the predictions of the thermophysical material properties are performed using our High Entropy Alloys CALPHAD database. Examples will be shown together with recent and ongoing developments related to AM which includes key-holing prediction and process maps. Precipitation reactions during heat-treatment of the as-built structures are simulated using TC-Prisma and our high entropy alloys mobility database.