SUSTAINABILITY WEBINAR SERIES
Advancing Aluminum Sustainability through CALPHAD and ICME
Speaker: Dr. John Aristeidakis
Thursday, November 27, 2025 at 2-3 PM CET/8-9 AM EST
This presentation exemplifies how utilizing CALPHAD-based ICME tools can advance sustainable aluminum production by addressing common industrial challenges related to recycling efficiently and effectively.
With growing pressure to meet ambitious sustainability and efficiency targets, the aluminum industry is increasingly turning to recycling as a key strategy for reducing environmental impact. However, several metallurgical and processing challenges limit the broader use of recycled aluminum. These include the formation of detrimental intermetallic phases due to scrap impurities, solidification cracking, porosity, and degradation of corrosion and mechanical properties. Such issues constrain scrap utilization, reduce productivity, and compromise product quality. Overcoming these challenges often requires extensive trial-and-error experimentation and costly industrial trials, which slow innovation and hinder progress toward circular manufacturing.
This presentation showcases how CALPHAD-based models and Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) workflows can be applied to overcome these limitations efficiently. Through predictive thermodynamic and kinetic simulations, we demonstrate how computational tools that link processing, structure, and properties can guide composition and process refinements, enabling control over phase stability, precipitation behavior, and solidification pathways to improve the performance of recycled aluminum alloys. By combining state-of-the-art predictive models with metallurgical expertise, the need for industrial trials and experiments is significantly reduced, lowering development time and cost.
Case studies will illustrate how this approach has been used to e.g. mitigate impurity effects, optimize homogenization and aging treatments, or support the qualification of recycled materials for demanding applications. The presentation highlights how integrating CALPHAD-based tools with engineering insight empowers aluminum industry stakeholders to make faster, more informed decisions that directly support sustainability objectives, such as reducing energy use, improving resource efficiency, and enhancing the circularity of aluminum production.
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About the Speaker
Dr. John Aristeidakis is a Senior Materials Design Engineer at Thermo-Calc Solutions, with a strong background in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Thessaly, Greece. His expertise lies in the development and application of ICME frameworks and CALPHAD-based models to accelerate alloy design and process optimization across a wide range of material systems. Dr. Aristeidakis has worked extensively on modeling process–structure–property relationships and has led and contributed to numerous academic and industrial R&D projects in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, and energy. His current focus is on addressing sustainability challenges in the aluminum industry, including the design of alloys for recycling, impurity management, and the integration of computational tools to minimize experimental trial-and-error, thereby reducing development time, cost, and environmental impact.
Dr. John Aristeidakis
Sr. Materials Design Engineer
Thermo-Calc Solutions AB