Engineering heat transfer is critical for applications in heat exchangers, semiconductor devices, thermoelectrics and more. This demand motivates a high-throughput computational methodology for systematically designing materials with improved thermal properties. One emerging method which can rapidly and explicitly consider phonon-phonon interactions even for highly anharmonic materials is Compressive Sensing Lattice Dynamics (CSLD). In fact, CSLD accurately predicts 2nd (harmonic) and 3rd+ order (anharmonic) interatomic force constants (IFCs) with orders of magnitude fewer Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations than conventional methods. However, doing CSLD can be an exhaustive, many-step process requiring an intimate knowledge of its sensitivity to parameters. Consequently, this work implements an automatic CSLD workflow capable of obtaining the thermal conductivity of potentially thousands of materials, benchmarks the stability of the workflow against materials with a range of anharmonicity, and begins constructing a dataset of thermal conductivity values and phonon dispersion curves to be stored in the Materials Project for public use.

We develop an automated high-throughput workflow for calculating lattice dynamical properties from first principles including those dictated by anharmonicity. The pipeline automatically computes interatomic force constants (IFCs) up to 4th order from perturbed training supercells, and uses the IFCs to calculate lattice thermal conductivity, coefficient of thermal expansion, and vibrational free energy and entropy. It performs phonon renormalization for dynamically unstable compounds to obtain real effective phonon spectra at finite temperatures and calculates the associated free energy corrections. The methods and parameters are chosen to balance computational efficiency and result accuracy, assessed through convergence testing and comparisons with experimental measurements. Deployment of this workflow at a large scale would facilitate materials discovery efforts toward functionalities including thermoelectrics, contact materials, ferroelectrics, aerospace components, as well as general phase diagram construction.