Stop Sizing Pipes in Excel: FluidFlow Does It in Minutes

Stop Sizing Pipes in Excel: FluidFlow Does It in Minutes

A practical overview of what FluidFlow is, what it does, and why engineers across mining, oil & gas, and power generation are switching.

There’s a moment every piping engineer knows well: you’re three hours into a spreadsheet, manually tracking pressure drops across a 40-node network, and you realize you’ve made a copy-paste error somewhere on row 94. You have no idea where. The deadline is tomorrow.

This is the problem FluidFlow was built to solve.

What Is FluidFlow?

FluidFlow is a pipe network analysis and fluid flow simulation platform developed by Flite Software N.I. Ltd. It has been in continuous development since 1984 and is now used by over 1,000 companies across mining, power generation, oil & gas, chemical processing, pharmaceutical, and marine industries.

At its core, FluidFlow performs steady-state hydraulic analysis, calculating pressure drop, flow distribution, temperature profiles, and equipment operating points across pipe networks of any complexity. It doesn’t model one pipe at a time. You build the complete network: every pipe, pump, valve, fitting, and boundary condition, and FluidFlow solves the entire system simultaneously.

The result is what the company calls a «true operating picture»: pump operating points, valve authority, system constraints, all in one model.

What Can It Model?

FluidFlow is modular, meaning you purchase and activate only the flow types relevant to your work. The available modules cover:

Liquid (Newtonian) Flow: Incompressible fluid systems, including water, oil, and chemical solutions. Calculates system pressures, flow distribution, and equipment sizing with accuracy benchmarked against Crane TP-410, Idelchik, and Miller reference publications.

Gas Flow: Compressible flow through piping systems, including compressor sizing, pressure relief, and gas distribution networks.

Two-Phase (Liquid-Gas) Flow: Models three scenarios: constant quality flow, flashing flow (liquid vaporizing as pressure drops), and condensing flow (vapor condensing along the flow path). Advanced correlations map flow regimes automatically.

Slurry Flow: Hydraulic transport of solid-liquid mixtures, covering settling slurries, non-settling slurries, and non-Newtonian flows, with pipe inclination effects accounted for. Particularly relevant for mining and mineral processing applications.

Non-Newtonian Flow: Handles fluids like polymers, sludge, and pastes that don’t follow standard viscosity behavior.

All of these can coexist in a single model. You don’t need separate software for separate fluid types.

Key Capabilities That Save Real Time

Auto-Sizing: FluidFlow proposes the most economical pipe size based on physical properties, capital cost, and energy cost, not just velocity rules of thumb. It automatically sizes pumps, relief valves, bursting disks, and control valves to ISO and API standards.

Back Calc & Multi Calc: Set a target outlet condition and work backwards. Or run multiple design scenarios simultaneously to compare configurations without rebuilding models from scratch.

Scripting for Dynamic Simulation: FluidFlow supports scripting to run time-dependent simulations, useful for investigating system control logic, valve sequencing, and pump startup/shutdown behavior.

Database Depth: The software ships with over 1,200 fluid properties and 800+ equipment entries. Engineers can also add custom components to the master database for project-specific hardware.

Heat Transfer Modeling: Thermal effects, including insulated and buried piping, are modeled directly, so temperature profiles along the network reflect real operating conditions.

What the Numbers Say

The time savings are significant and independently reported. CoMo-Industrial Engineering measured an 80% reduction in project time compared to Excel-based modeling. FluidFlow maintains over 300 QA test networks, validated against reference data and industry standards, and the development team is ISO 9001 certified. Engineers using FluidFlow have reported being able to balance multi-nozzle flow distributions quickly, right-size piping without pressure-reducing valves, and pass time savings directly to clients.

Who Should Be Looking at This?

If your team is still doing pipe network analysis in spreadsheets, the time and error risk trade-off has likely already exceeded the cost of the software. FluidFlow is worth a serious look if you’re in mining or mineral processing (slurry transport, process water systems), oil & gas (gas distribution, liquid pipelines, two-phase lines), power generation (steam systems, cooling water, condensate return), chemical and pharmaceutical (corrosive fluids, non-Newtonian process streams), or water and wastewater treatment (municipal and industrial network modeling).

A 14-day free trial is available at https://fluidflowinfo.com/freetrial/

Final Thought

Pipe network design is one of those engineering tasks where the margin for error is narrow and the cost of getting it wrong, whether that’s over-sized pumps, under-sized pipes, or unsafe pressure conditions, compounds quickly. Tools like FluidFlow exist because the problem is genuinely complex, and spreadsheets genuinely aren’t built for it.

Whether you’re designing a new system or troubleshooting an existing one, the software’s ability to model the whole network, not just a single line, changes what’s possible in a day of engineering work.

Interested in how software like FluidFlow fits into a broader design workflow? Feel free to connect or reach out; it’s exactly what we work on at DConsulthink.