The austenitic stainless steel (X5CrNi18-10) although is best suited for high corrosion resistance applications, however it faces the challenge of hot cracking during post-welding dendritic solidification. Dendritic growth is a common phenomenon during the solidification of alloys, which significantly impacts the final microstructure and mechanical properties, whose complete understanding is still needed. The goal of this research is to fill the gap by looking at various aspects influenced by process-specific extreme thermal conditions at the microscale.  For this purpose, a multi-component and multi-phase field approach is used in grand chemical potential-based phase-field simulations. This intensive research process is carried out using an open source research and data management framework Kadi4mat [1]. In order to handle various analysis and simulation steps, a workflow was developed incorporating thermodynamic modelling activities. It allows easier and effective management of data and metadata, as well as the ability to develop and execute workflows. This gives the advantage of running the analysis and simulation steps automatically with minimal user input. The workflow starts with fitting the thermo-solutal function of the system from the CALPHAD database, then analyses weld pool surface data to derive temperature gradients and growth angles. Finally, it prepares simulation inputs for execution on HPC clusters. The whole process is adaptable to different systems, using available CALPHAD and experimental weld pool information.
From this systematic study, it is observed that, apart from global processing conditions, local conditions are also important to consider. For instance, the morphology changes from columnar-dendritic to cellular moving from centreline to the fusion-line adjacent to the weld pool liquidus  curve due to variation in local solidification velocity and thermal gradient.