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 one of the four examples the product itself suggests, so it exercises a supported path end to end:

Quench 22MnB5 at 50 °C/s and predict the as-quenched 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 Time Step field,
• a read-only line summarizing the temperature curve it built from your sentence, for example Curve: 0s → 860°C, …,
• a Run Simulation button.

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 collapses to a green confirmation line of the form "Heat treatment simulation submitted — grade, dt=your time steps".

Step 5 — Watch it run#

A tool card appears, labeled HT simulation. It is amber while running, green when it finishes, red if it fails. 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

You do not have to sit there. If you close the tab, the run continues on the server and reattaches when you come back — you will see a "Resuming simulation from background..." banner while it catches up.

Step 6 — Read the result#

The reply follows a fixed shape: a summary first, then concise Key Results bullets, then a named plot, then one to four suggested next steps. 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 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 "50 °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 remaining product suggestions each land in a different simulator:

Generate a CCT diagram for DP600 and find the critical cooling rate for full martensite.

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.

Spot-weld two 1.5 mm DP600 sheets at 8 kA and show the 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 a V-Gleeble weld-HAZ cycle on 22MnB5 and check for HAZ softening.

The V-Gleeble Configuration card carries a test-mode dropdown and mode-specific fields, and its button reads Run V-Gleeble Test. See Virtual Gleeble.

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