About FlowTran

History of FlowTran and SIROGAS

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The development of FlowTran commenced with the NAIAD program developed by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission to model the flows in nuclear reactor cooling networks.  

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In 1982 this work was transferred to CSIRO Division of Mineral Physics as it was being further developed for flow of natural gas with support from The Pipeline Authority.   A modified version of NAIAD called SIROGAS with an interactive front end developed by The Pipeline Authority was adopted by The Pipeline Authority, PASA and AGL.  This version included the ability to run on Apple computers as well as Windows machines.

The capability to detect leaks in a network by mass balance was included.  Over the next few years, development of SIROGAS continued with the State Energy Commission of Western Australia, AGL and others in South Korea and New Zealand using the software.

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In 1992 the principal developer of NAIAD and SIROGAS, William J Turner, retired from CSIRO after an agreement was reached that passed all responsibility, coding, clients and documentation to William J Turner Pty Ltd. This company registered the trade mark FlowTran in Western Australia and created www.FlowTran.com.au.

Feedback from users drove the rapid development of a front end for the program coded in Visual Basic - FlowTran. Output display procedures were developed including animated graphics and user controlled displays in Excel. The capability of leak detection was further developed and tested with data from an operating pipeline.

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FlowTran and SIROGAS became widely used in Australia and with clients in South Korea, China and Sri Lanka.

Then in 2015 the capability of the SIROGAS / FlowTran package was extended to include all fluids in the REFPROP software for transport properties of industrially important fluids and their mixtures from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.  This enabled simulation of flow of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and any other single phase fluids in REFPROP.

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By 2016 FlowTran, including SIROGAS, was in use by many operators of natural gas and ethane transmission pipelines for simulation of pipeline networks.  

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In 2016, FlowTran Pty Ltd was acquired by three experienced oil and gas professionals with a vision that the way engineering software is used had to change.  The first step in the journey was the acquisition of FlowTran and SIROGAS, the industry leader in modelling transient and steady state behaviour in complex pipeline networks.  Since acquisition the team has continued to develop the front and back end interfaces to make the FlowTran/SIROGAS package more accessible to engineers and to broaden its application to commercial uses.  

The result is FlowTran-X, a browser-based application which does everything that FlowTran/SIROGAS does, but with more intuitive interfaces, and is backward compatible with existing FlowTran models.

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Following extensive beta testing FlowTran-X was released in June 2020 with existing FlowTran users looking to transition to FlowTran-X.  FlowTran Pty Ltd continues to evolve FlowTran-X by keeping abreast of industry developments and listening to the user community.