ElasTool: An automated toolkit for elastic constants calculation

Abstract: We here present, the ElasTool package, an automated toolkit for calculating the second-order elastic constants (SOECs) of any two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) crystal systems. It can utilize three kinds of strain-matrix sets, the high-efficiency strain-matrix sets (OHESS), the universal linear-independent coupling strains (ULICS) and the all-single-element strain-matrix sets (ASESS) to calculate the SOECs automatically. In an automatic manner, ElasTool can deal with both zero- and high-temperature elastic constants. The theoretical background and computational method of elastic constants, the package structure, the installation and run, the input/output files, the controlling parameters, and two representative examples of ElasTool are described detailedly. ElasTool is useful for either the exploration of materials' elastic properties or high-throughput new materials design. ElasTool is also available at our website: www.matdesign.cn.