Your first simulation

Before you start#

You do not need an account for this. Open the chat and the composer is already focused, showing the placeholder "How can I help you with Phases?". If you want to see the product's own examples first, there is a small Suggestions button under the composer on an empty chat; clicking a suggestion fills the box without sending it.

Enter sends. Shift+Enter adds a newline.

Step 1 — Say what you want, in one sentence#

Paste this. It is the heat-treatment example the product itself suggests, word for word, so it exercises a supported path end to end:

Simulate 22MnB5 cooling at 30 °C/s and show phase fractions, dilatation, and hardness.

Two things make this a good first prompt. It names a material — 22MnB5, a press-hardening (boron) hot-forming steel — and it names a process. Phases needs both before it will run anything.

Step 2 — Phases resolves the material first#

The agent loads 22MnB5 and shows you a short material summary before it goes any further. When you name a specific grade together with a specific simulation, it proceeds directly rather than interrogating you, but it still shows what material it resolved so you can catch a mismatch immediately.

If your material is a custom chemistry rather than a catalog grade, this is the step where the confirmation gate appears instead. See Using your own chemistry.

Step 3 — Read the parameter card#

Phases replies with an interactive card headed Heat Treatment Configuration. It contains:

• a Material dropdown, pre-filled with what it resolved,
• a Cooling Rate (°C/s) field, read back from the final descending segment of the curve and accepted between 0.01 and 1000 °C/s, with a guidance strip of typical rates you can click,
• a read-only line summarizing the temperature curve it built from your sentence, for example Curve: 0s → 860°C, …,
• a read-only Step size line reading auto — <n>s over <t>s,
• a Run Simulation button, and an Advanced button beside it.

You cannot set the time step, and that is deliberate: the card derives it from the thermal cycle so the temperature resolution stays roughly constant whether the run quenches in nine seconds or air-cools for a quarter of an hour. Whatever the model pre-filled is replaced rather than forwarded. Ask for a specific dt and you will be steered to the cooling rate instead.

Advanced hands the card's current values to the full simulation panel, where the whole parameter set is editable. The chat card is deliberately compact; Advanced is how you reach what it does not show.

If you are running a chemistry you supplied rather than a catalog grade, a warning may appear above the fields — "Outside the kinetics model's fitted range" — naming the material and stating that the phase fractions and hardness this run reports are not validated there. It appears only when the resolver actually returned that verdict, so its absence is not an endorsement, but its presence is worth reading before you press Run.

Nothing has run yet. This card is the point where you check the agent's interpretation against your intent. If the peak temperature, the hold, or the cooling ramp is not what you meant, say so in the next message and it will re-issue the card — or change the material in the dropdown and run it as-is.

This card-first pattern is not decoration. Read How the conversation works for why every expensive action is gated this way.

Step 4 — Press Run Simulation#

Pressing the button posts a message into the conversation on your behalf that begins Run heat treatment simulation with configuration: followed by the exact JSON the card held. You can see it in the transcript. That is intentional: the parameters that ran are part of the conversation record, not hidden state.

The card stays where it is and marks itself done: a green ✓ Submitted badge appears in its header and the button becomes a disabled Submitted. It does not collapse, so the parameters that ran stay readable in the transcript.

Step 5 — Watch it run#

A tool card appears, labeled HT simulation. A thin rail across the top of it carries its state: the rail sweeps while the solver works and settles green when it finishes. You will not normally see a red one — in production a failed tool's card is withheld entirely and you get a one-sentence message instead.

While the solver integrates, the card shows live numbers:

• Step — the current integration step
• t = …s — simulated time
• T = … K — current temperature
• the dominant phase and its percentage

Below the turn, a status banner reports the run's database-authoritative state — Queued, then Running with the stage it has reached, then Completed — and carries a Cancel simulation button while it is still active.

You do not have to sit there. The solver runs on the server, not in your tab, so closing the browser does not stop it; when you come back the chat reconnects and replays. While a simulation is running covers the whole vocabulary, the deadlines and how to get back to a run later.

Step 6 — Read the result#

The reply follows a fixed shape: a summary first, then concise Key Results bullets, then a named plot, then at most two suggested next steps, each tied to a number this run actually produced. Units are seconds for time, Kelvin for temperature, and 0–1 or percent for phase fractions, rounded to two or three significant figures.

The default plot for a heat treatment is the one labeled Phase Fractions vs Time in the gallery, stored as Time_phase.png — phase fractions against time, with temperature overlaid on a secondary axis. If you want a different view, ask for it by name:

Plot dilatation for that run

Plot dilatation vs temperature

Alongside the phase fractions the solver writes a dilatation history and a hardness history and stores them with the run. Two things to keep in mind when you read the hardness: it is a bulk, mixture value for the whole microstructure, not the intrinsic hardness of any one phase, and "30 °C/s" is a cooling rate, not a quench medium — Phases will not call it a water or oil quench, and neither should you unless you supplied that mapping yourself. Both rules, and the grades where the model is known to run high or low, are set out in Known limits.

Step 7 — The run is kept#

Every simulation creates a numbered run in the current session: run_001, run_002, and so on. Version numbers are allocated once and never reused. You can come back later and ask:

List my previous runs

Details are in Sessions, runs and artifacts and Reuse and share runs. Everything the heat-treatment simulator accepts and returns is covered in Heat treatment.

Why "run a simulation" gets a question back#

Try it and you will get a question, not a run:

run a simulation

There is no default material in Phases, and the agent is instructed not to assume one. Ask for "a simulation", "a CCT", "a Gleeble test", "welding" or "surprise me" with no grade named, and it asks which material you want and offers examples. The tool layer enforces the same rule independently, returning:

Please choose a material before running a simulation. Examples: DC04, DP600, 22MnB5, EN13261, a workspace material, or a custom composition.

This is the single most important behavior to internalize. A simulation on an unstated material is a number without provenance; the product would rather ask.

Try the other three#

The other three shipped suggestions each land in a different simulator. These are the exact strings behind the Suggestions button:

Generate a CCT diagram for DP600 across 0.1–100 °C/s and compare the transformation paths.

The card is headed CCT Diagram Configuration with a material, a comma-separated Rates (°C/s) field, and start and final temperatures; the button reads Generate CCT Diagram. See CCT and TTT and Find the critical cooling rate.

Simulate two 1.5 mm DP600 sheets at 8 kA and show the weld nugget growth.

RSW always shows its configuration card first, even when you have already stated every value — the values are pre-filled into the card, but the card still appears. See Resistance spot welding.

Run Virtual Gleeble CCT dilatometry for 22MnB5 and show the dilatation curve.

The V-Gleeble Configuration card carries a test-mode dropdown — here set to CCT dilatometry, one of eight modes — plus the fields that mode needs, and its button reads Run V-Gleeble Test. See Virtual Gleeble.

If something goes wrong along the way, start at Common problems.