Tips and Tricks: Speeding Up TTP and CCT Calculations

For a general precipitation calculation, the precipitates are divided into a large number of size groups in order to get a good size distribution, for example. However, this can make multi-component calculations slow. There are some cases when this is not necessary, such as when performing Time-Temperature-Precipitation (TTP) and Continuous Cooling Transformation (CCT) calculations. You can therefore speed up these calculations by changing the settings.

How to Speed Up TTP and CCT Calculations in Graphical Mode

When performing TTP calculations in the Precipitation Module (TC-PRISMA) of Thermo-Calc, the default parameters for particle size distribution make the TTP calculation slow. The same applies to CCT calculations. However, since we are only interested in the TTP/CCT curves, there is no need to have a detailed description of particle size distributions when performing these calculations. You can therefore speed up your TTP and CCT calculations by decreasing the particle size distribution parameters. This is done with these simple steps: 

1. In Graphical Mode, select the Precipitation Simulation template and set up your TTP or CCT calculation as usual. 
2. Within the Precipitation Calculator node, go to the Options tab.
3. Lower the default values for the three following parameters by one order of magnitude (as shown in the figure below): 
   • No. of grid points over one order of magnitude in radius
   • Max no. of grid points over one order of magnitude in radius
   • Min no. of grid points over one order of magnitude in radius
4. Perform your calculation.