AFT Blog
The Opposite of Good Vibrations - Evaluating FIV, AIV, FIP Guidelines from AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow
Learn how to use AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow to help calculate the Likelihood of Failure (LOF) for Flow Induced Vibration (FIV), Acoustic Induced Vibration (AIV), and Flow Induced Pulsation (FIP) in accordance with Energy Institute Guidelines to avoid v...
It's a Pump! It's a Turbine! It's a Pump as Turbine!
Pumps and turbines may serve opposite purposes, but fundamentally, they operate under the same principles. Both pieces of equipment convert between usable work and fluid energy, and both often use an impeller to make the conversion. Differences betwe...
What Is Transient Analysis?
You're tasked to perform a transient analysis of a piping system and it would be really helpful if there was a good software tool out there to help you. Well, you've come to the right place because AFT has great solutions! ...
Know Your Pump & System Curves - Part 3
In the final "Know Your Pump & System Curves" blog series, I am going to discuss the complexities behind pump vs. system curves for systems with pumps in series and parallel configurations. Multiple pumps in series configurations are relatively s...
Digital Twin – Identical or Fraternal?
When I was a child, I was jealous of twins. I thought how cool it would be to have a twin. I had twin cousins a few years older than I was that I saw on a frequent basis. I always got them confused. Which one was Roger, and which one was Ronny? A buz...
That Valve’s Got Character – Applying Pre-defined Characteristic Curves
Valves are often oversimplified during modeling. Understandably, defining a valve with its range of Cv at various open percentages requires much more information than an engineer may have during the initial design phase. However, just like handbook d...
Twenty-five years ago I did something I thought I would never do. My job at the time had become pretty bumpy and I was not happy. With hard work and good luck, I turned that negative experience into a new direction for me personally and professionally. That new direction involved starting a whole new company. On September 14, 1993. So, I have been ...
AFT Fathom has long included the ability to model multi-stage pumps by representing them with an overall effective pump curve. New in AFT Fathom 10 is the ability to model "Interstage Bleed" or "Takeoff Flow" in these multi-stage pumps.
It is true. New Jersey is a barrier in Spain. I saw it with my own eyes. Bear with me and I will explain.
When I travel internationally I find the people, cultural and language differences fascinating. Last month I was fascinated once again. My blog last month was written while on an airplane as I travelled to Europe (see my July blog When Pipe Stress Analysis Meets Waterhammer Hydraulics: New Waterhammer Guidelines for Engineers). Before going to the ASME PVP conference in Prague (check out this video one of our staff made) I stopped in Spain for 4 days. While there I was fortunate to visit the location of an AFT Impulse project by one of our customers that was a Platinum Pipe Award Winner this year. This case study was published in April. See AFT Impulse™ Matches Data For Pumping Station Check Valve Closure. That pump station photo in the case study is where I visited. Below is a photo of me and the PPA winner David Lozano Solé of AQUATEC – SUEZ Group. For those interested, this project is being presented as a technical paper by David at the 2018 Pressure Surges Conference in Bordeax, France in November. I will be there to help and also present two other papers of my own. So where does New Jersey come into this?
Hello AFT readers! It has been quite a while since I have written a blog for you all. I had a recent discussion with a user and discovered a couple pain points that may be common. We did not have any blogs on the topics yet and I figured it was time to get back in the game and write another blog for our readers! The pain points were: 1. Modeling sy...
In district heating projects, hot water is the most commonly used heating medium. In order to ensure the user's heat load requirements, it is necessary to analyze and calculate the flow balance of the entire district heating system to ensure that different cases can meet the requirements of end users.
AFT Fathom is practical fluid dynamic simulation software used to calculate pressure drop and flow distribution in liquid piping and ducting systems. I think AFT Fathom is a great choice for district heating projects.The district heating network model of this project is bigger, and it includes the long supply line and return line, several booster pump stations, about 50 end users(exchangers), many control valves. This project has been running for 2 years, but some end user cannot get enough heat, so the owner hope us to get the reason.
I am sitting on an airplane at this moment somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and I am excited. Something that has been in the works for 22 years will happen next Monday, July 16 in Prague, Czech Republic. That is where the ASME PVP 2018 Conference will happen and I get to make a presentation.
Last year I helped AECOM, an AFT customer and AFT Impulse user, develop a set of pragmatic internal design documents for their project on handling radioactive fluid transport. Two of these documents provided their engineers guidance on interpreting and applying transient cavitation predictions.We proposed these two documents to the ASME PVP Division and they liked them enough to allow us to publish two new papers at their conference. I will be presenting these papers on behalf of AECOM and AFT.
Here at AFT we are always looking for more ways to bring more convenience and accuracy to our model files. One of the ways we are doing this is with NIST REFPROP, the new fluids database that we have incorporated into AFT Fathom 10 and is coming soon in AFT Arrow 7 and AFT Impulse 7. Unlike Chempak, REFPROP is included at no additional cost to users. In this blog I will highlight a few reasons why you may want to take advantage of this database.