Creating Custom Fluids in Flownex

Friday Flownex Tech Tips #6

Occasionally glossed over, adding custom fluids is a fairly standard operation in Flownex that we don’t think about until it’s necessary. There are a couple of ways to do this which we’ll go over in today’s post. I am working in Flownex 8.12.7.4334.

Creating a mixed fluid

To create a mixed fluid we first need to create a folder for this fluid in our project database. This can be done in the charts and lookup tables pane by right clicking on “mixed fluids” and selecting “add category”. We can create our new fluid by right-clicking on the new folder and selecting “Add a new mixed fluid”. Note we can right-click and rename both the fluid itself and the containing folder.

To define our new mixed fluid we double-click on the new mixed fluid to open the editor. Here we can add the components of our mixed fluids.

Creating a new fluid from scratch

To create a fluid from scratch we repeat the same process of creating a folder and creating a new fluid as above with the exception being that we’d complete these steps under the “Pure Fluids” category. Once this is done we’ll need to double-click or right-click > edit our from scratch fluid and enter in the fluid properties. Note for many properties we can define the relationship with pressure and temperature as constant (non-dependent), table, equation, or script.

Importing a fluid

To import a fluid we will follow the same steps of creating the folder under pure fluids. Now instead of right-clicking and adding new we will right-click and select “import”. Then we simply navigate to our desired fluid file and click “Ok”.

Bonus Tips!

• In the window where you define your fluid you’ll notice the “Test” button. This feature can be utilized to test created fluids to confirm properties against known properties for given pressures and temperatures.
• We can also copy and paste fluids from the master database into the project database to give us a good starting point for creating similar fluids (or extending properties to higher/lower temps/pressures).