AFT Blog

Safety is a primary consideration in engineering design. Safety for people is always paramount. Safety for the environment is an ever-growing focus of engineers. Any engineer worth the name would feel devastated if their engineering effort failed for some reason to protect people and the environment. One of the things engineers rely on to make system designs and operations safer are analytical tools like those developed by Applied Flow Technology (AFT). How does AFT software make the world a safer place?

AFT Impulse will be celebrating it's 20th anniversary later this year in November. I was the original software developer of AFT Impulse back in 1996 and was still actively writing code up through AFT Impulse 4. So AFT Impulse is near and dear to my heart. Within the next few days we will be releasing AFT Impulse 6 and it will have some new and extremely powerful graphing features (more on that below).

The majority of steady-state, incompressible hydraulic models made in AFT Fathom that we see as Applications engineers typically converge very rapidly. However, every once in a while, that occasional AFT Fathom model arrives in our Support inbox that just won’t converge. At first glance, passing a graduate level course in compressible flow without ever missing an exam question may seem more likely than getting to the source of the convergence issue in one of these typically-monstrous models (like in Figure 1), but the tips below show that determining and correcting the problem preventing convergence is frequently straightforward and much easier than...

Borrowing a line from Mark Twain, the death of Moore's Law has been greatly exaggerated. Many times over the years. But have the death prognosticators gotten it right this time? And, if so, what will it mean for engineers?

Inventing. Innovating. Creating. Conceiving. Problem solving. Engineering.

You’ve built your AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow model, defined all pipes and junctions, specified your fluid properties and defined your pressure boundary conditions. But for some reason, your predicted flows are still not matching measured data. AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow is properly solving the fundamental equations, but it is likely that something is off in the inputted data. In many cases, this is the pipe’s resistance. Many factors can alter a pipe’s resistance, but the two primary reasons resistance may be incorrect is (1) corrosion of the pipe over time, which increases a pipe’s absolute roughness and (2) the buildup of residue on the walls of the pipeline, known as scaling, which decreases a pipe’s inner diameter. This decrease in diameter is very important and will increase a pipe’s resistance dramatically. Now you have a dilemma. You can’t cut open your pipe to see how much scaling there is or how much your pipe has corroded. What is the condition of your pipe? Using AFT Fathom GSC or AFT Arrow GSC, you can find out!

When I was a young engineer in the aerospace industry I frequently attended dinner meetings in the San Diego area on science and technology. At one of those meetings (in 1988 or early 1989) the featured speaker was Roger Revelle, often referred to as the father of (man-made) global warming science. Dr. Revelle passed away just a couple years later and while he was far along in years at the time, it was clear his intellect was still sharp. He spent much of his career in the San Diego area at UC San Diego and the nearby Scripps Institute of Oceanography.