1. Introduction

     Throughout the manufacturing industry, casting process simulation is now widely accepted as an important tool in product design and process development  to improve yield and casting quality. Casting simulation requires high-quality information concerning thermo-physical and physical properties during solidification. Some properties have been measured for specific alloys, but the number of alloys for which information is avail-able is limited. Furthermore,  the information may be incomplete in the sense that not all properties have been measured and sometimes,dispa-rate information from a variety of sources is used to build up the database for one specific alloy. The latter situation  can lead to inconsistent re-sults, as the composition of the alloys used for database creation may not be the same and consequently critical temperatures, such as for the solidus and invariant reactions, may differ between the alloys. To overcome the lack of data and achieve a better understanding of how changes in composition within a specification range of an alloy may affect solidification properties, it is highly desirable to develop com-puter models for calcu-lation of the thermo-physical and physical properties of multi-component alloys during solidification.

    Java-based materials properties software (JMatPro) provides extensive information on how the properties of an alloy may change within its spe-cification range, as well as providing detailed information on the properties of each indivi-dual phase[1,2], such as the liquid phase in the mushy zone, which is usually beyond the capability of measurement. Thermodynamic modelling based on the CALPHAD methodology is a well-estab-lished technique for modelling of phase equilibria in multicomponent alloys [3]. By extending it to non-equilibrium solidification using the so-called Scheil–Gulliver (SG) model,excellent results for the phases forming during solidification as well as their composition and temperature range of formation can be obtained [4–8]. Successful predictions for fraction solid versus temperature, phase formation and latent heat evolution  have been incorporated into casting simulation packages, where they have achieved high-quality results.

   However, JMatPro has gone one step further by developing an extensive capability for the calculation of physical and thermophysical properties [1,9], which can be integrated with the thermodynamic calculations to provide wide-ranging thermophysical and physical properties for use in solidification modelling.

``````