Automated Analysis of Phase Diagrams

We present a study on automated analysis of phase diagrams to aid the materials science community that attempts to lay the groundwork for a large-scale, searchable, digitized database of phases of a wide variety of materials at different physical conditions and compositions. For this work, we concentrate on around 80 thermodynamic phase diagrams of binary metallic alloy systems which give phase information of alloys at varied temperatures and mixture ratios. We use image processing techniques to isolate phase boundaries and subsequently extract areas of the same phase. Simultaneously, document analysis techniques are employed to recognize and group the text used to label the phases; text present along the axes is identified so as to map image coordinates (x, y) to physical coordinates. Labels of unlabeled phases are inferred using standard rules. Once a phase diagram is thus digitized we are able to provide the phase of all materials present in our database at any given temperature and alloy mixture ratio. Using the digitized data, more complex queries may also be supported in the future. We evaluate our system by measuring the correctness of labeling of phase regions.