A new thermodynamic database has been combined with an existing kinetic database to perform coarsening simulations in ternary systems including MC and M7C3 carbides in an fee matrix. The kinetic database was revised taking into consideration the new experimental information on the Fe-Cr-V-C system obtained in the present work, and available experiments on the ternary Fe-Cr-C and Fe-V-C systems. After revision the agreement between experimental results and simulations was satisfactory. It was found that the interfacial energy of M7C3 was twice as large as that of the MC carbide. The calculations for commercial steels with 6 alloy elements gave results in satisfactory agreement with new experimental measurements. The present coarsening simulations use the calculated equilibrium state and the observed particle sizes as the state for the start of the simulations. All the simulations were performed with the DICTRA software. © 2008 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.