For information on ordering books, CDs, DVDs, the PC product or Phase Equilibria Diagrams Online go to ACerS Phase Equilibria Diagrams
The PC product can also be purchased from NIST, go to https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-standard-reference-database-31 or Email: data@nist.gov

Julia Dana, Tyler Broyles, Michael Faughn, Sam Dana, Art Griesser (Prometheus Computing, LLC)
PED Viewer (JavaScript): Julia Dana
PED Editor (Java): Eric Boesch

Kimberly Hill

William Laws and Craig Heimbach

Michael Hill

John Hastie

Terrell Vanderah

Eileen De Guire and Jonathon Foreman

The fund-raising effort in the 1980's managed by ACerS resulted in a fund of almost $2,000,000 contributed to the program. There are five basic categories of participation in the Ceramic Phase Equilibria Program: Primary Sponsors, $200,000 or more; Sponsors, $100,000 or more; Affiliate Sponsors, $25,000 or more; Contributors, $5,000 or more; and Members and Friends, any smaller amount. Contributions are still welcome. The contributions of individuals and of the following organizations are gratefully acknowledged. PRIMARY SPONSORS PRIMARY SPONSORS FEDERAL SPONSORS AFFILIATE SPONSORS AFFILIATE SPONSORS FEDERAL CONTRIBUTORS SECTIONS, MEMBERS, AND MATCHING GIFTS *Through the Joint Program on Critical Compilation of Physical and Chemical Data coordinated by Standard Reference Data at NIST.

Program Origin and Evolution: Since 1933, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (then NBS, the National Bureau of Standards) and The American Ceramic Society (ACerS) have collaborated on the production and publication of evaluated phase diagrams of ceramic systems. These diagrams serve as maps of the equilibrium chemical and structural behaviors exhibited by materials and provide critical starting information for the rational design of materials processing schemes, for quality assurance efforts, and for optimization of the physical and chemical properties of advanced materials. The joint Ceramic Phase Equilibria Program, representing a continuation and expansion of the effort to make ceramic phase information readily and comprehensively available, was formally established in December 1982 along with a fund-raising effort by ACerS which resulted in an endowment fund of almost $2,000,000. The program goal was, and continues to be, to support growth and progress in the ceramic industries and research by providing relevant critically evaluated phase equilibrium diagrams. To achieve this, a Data Center was established at NIST/Gaithersburg to improve currency with the archival literature and to provide critically evaluated phase diagrams for oxides, salts, carbides, pnictides, borides, compound semiconductors, and chalcogenides. At this time, a major goal was established to computerize all data activities.

The first efforts to convert from hard-copy text and India-ink drawings to an electronically accessible system commenced in the 1980's and resulted in a Fortran database system. As part of this effort, Data Center staff developed computer files for all references, commentaries, and chemical classification information, as well as the diagrams themselves in graphics form using an HPBasic program written by the late Dr. Peter K. Schenck - this program was used to digitize all diagrams published after Volume V (1983). Publication of the hard-copy "blue books" continued using this new system, and in 1992 was accompanied by version 1.0 of a computer product which was distributed as a set of ten 3.5-inch disks with text and scanned diagrams from Vols. I-V. Version 2.0, created by Mr. Tom Green using Visual Basic, was released as a CD-ROM in 1995 and included graphics capabilities to manipulate post-Volume V diagrams (zoom, lever rule, curve follow, overlay, mol% to wt%).

The reference series was published from 1964 to 1992 as the well-known Phase Diagrams for Ceramists "blue books", also known as NIST Standard Reference Database (SRD) 31. After the 1992 title change to the more general Phase Equilibria Diagrams - to emphasize that the data are useful to the broader materials community - new content continued to be published in the form of hard-copy topical volumes (in addition to the CD-ROM version). In 2002, after a disastrous system failure during production of the Zirconia volume, a modernization effort was launched by Mr. Jim You to design and implement a new content management system for the Data Center using a relational database (SQL Server) and Visual Basic. As part of this effort, the Data Center hired numerous part-time students from the Geology Department of the University of Maryland at College Park to digitize the 6,254 diagrams from Volumes I-V that existed only as India-ink drawings or scanned images. These efforts resulted in an all-inclusive, searchable CD-ROM version 3 that was released in 2004. All diagrams in the series (approximately 20,000) were finally available as manipulable graphics files.

In 2005, as a result of customer preference for the CD-ROM format which provided inclusive coverage of all material published in the series in addition to analytical capabilities, publication of material-class-oriented hard-copy volumes - the "blue books" - was discontinued. In response, software and editing processes for SRD 31 were modified to convert to continuous publication of new data retrieved from the archival literature, regardless of material class. Volume 14 (2005) was the last hard-copy blue book published. All "Volumes" published thereafter are "virtual" and are only available in electronic form - these volumes now consist of periodic content updates providing 500-1000 new phase diagrams for a wide variety of system-types. However, all post-Volume-14 figures (and revised older figures) were made available to the customer as PDF files which are identical in quality to those in the printed books.

The most recent modernization of the Data Center was launched in late 2010 and has resulted in an entirely new custom-developed content management system (CMS) which is web-based and runs under Ubuntu Linux using the Ruby programming language. The system (developed by Prometheus Computing, LLC) uses the Nginx web server, an SQLite database, and an object relational mapper for the GUI. In a parallel effort, Mr. Eric Boesch developed all-new software for diagram digitization, the PED Editor - a Java program which uses the iText open-source PDF file generation library, Batik open-source SVG file generation library, Jackson open-source JSON file generation library, and the JAMA Java Matrix package. These efforts produced series 4 of the PC and online products, which used an interactive diagram viewer derived from the PED Editor. The full PED Editor program is available as freeware (at https://pages.nist.gov/PEDEditor/) and can be used 1) to digitize phase diagrams and 2) to extract data from phase diagrams or other two-dimensional scientific drawings.

This release, Version 5.2 provides new content for volume 26 and, as for all series-5 versions, includes the JavaScript PED diagram viewer developed by Ms. Julia Dana for interactive display of the diagrams (see Viewer Help next to the main Help menu). The PED application no longer requires the installation of Java, although diagrams can still be downloaded and opened using the legacy (Java-based) PED Viewer (see main Help menu for details). The search interface is very similar to the previous series-4 versions and functions with the same software that resulted from the most recent upgrade of the CMS and the user interface. All PED Figures are available as printable .pdf files which provide the commentary text as well as all diagrams, similar to the previous entries in the hard-copy books. In addition, all phase diagrams in the collection are present in the updated format, can be interactively displayed using the PED Viewer, and can be printed as high-quality .pdf files or downloaded as .png or .jpg files with customized resolution.

Other features for version 5.2 are described in the help pages

By F.P. Hall, H. Insley, E.M. Levin, H.F. McMurdie and C.R. Robbins
From: Phase Diagrams For Ceramists, Volume I; edited by E.M. Levin, C.R. Robbins and H.F. McMurdie, pages 5-36, 1964.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Standard Reference Data Program
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Email: data@nist.gov
Web:  https://www.nist.gov/srd/nist-standard-reference-database-31
ACerS Customer Service
ACerS Headquarters

The American Ceramic Society and the National Institute of Standards and Technology encourage you to send comments and suggestions to phase3@ceramics.org