Abstract A comprehensive understanding of the solidification process is of paramount importance for the control and prediction of actual casting characteristics. The present work presents the potential of cooling curve analysis to characterize the solidification path of a cast hypoeutectic series of Al–Si–Cu alloys. The aim of this work was to examine how variation in chemical composition of Si (from 5–9 wt.%) and Cu (from 1–4 wt.%) may affect characteristic solidification temperatures, their corresponding solid fraction, and thermal freezing ranges of the investigated alloys. All solidification parameters that have been calculated using cooling curve analysis show good correlation with the corresponding parameters calculated using commercial Pandat software. These parameters, either collected from the cooling curve analysis or calculated using Pandat software, can be easily incorporated into existing simulation software packages in order to improve their accuracy. In addition, cooling curve analysis can be used to estimate the effect of cooling rate on the above mentioned solidification parameters and used as additional input data for simulation.