NIST thermophysical property database for metal systems - freely accessible via Application Programming Interface

Rapid advancements in materials simulation tools, the well-known CALPHAD approach to computational material development, and the general challenges of the complex multiphysics in developing theoretical and computational solutions for predicting material properties need electronically accessible data. Very often parameters must be scaled to, or models relay on verification with original experimental thermophysical property data and require improved data reliability and interoperability compared to historic data from various print formats.

The Thermodynamics Research Center (TRC) within NIST has addressed those challenges around availability of thermophysical property data for metal systems for many years.

The presented database for thermophysical property data (e.g. Enthalpy, viscosity, electrical resistivity, ...) is publicly accessible at http://trc.nist.gov/metals_data (DOI: 10.18434/M32153) and free of charge for noncommercial users. All data is in a well-structured machine-readable format and includes metadata that makes it easy to find for both, humans, and computers. Due to its free nature, it can easily be integrated with other applications and can be queried via a web user interface or an Application Programming Interface (RESTful API).

This talk includes a short general overview of the NIST/TRC Data Archival System of primarily unary, binary, and ternary metal systems and how we convert information from data as presented in the open literature into structured, well-vetted datasets.

It will highlight how to access the data programmatically for individual applications via our RESTful API and discuss the data format used.