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...
One of the newest features of AFT Fathom 9 that will add a lot more efficiency to analyzing your results is the new Design Alert Manager! In addition to the new Design Alert Manager, it is also possible to add general Design Alerts for junctions such as inlet or outlet pressure, or perhaps the pressure loss across a junction. In previous versions of our software, it would be possible to create different Design Alerts for pipes where you could specify a minimum or maximum value for a particular output parameter such as a maximum pressure limit, minimum flow rate, maximum velocity,...
When I started AFT back in 1994 I had the idea to develop a product for compressible flow in pipe systems. After AFT Fathom 1.0 was released in April 1994 I began research on numerical methods for compressible flow in pipe networks. Books and papers that claimed to offer methods for compressible flow inevitably focused on single pipe applications with adiabatic or isothermal flow - and often with ideal gases. I wanted to develop a real gas software that could model heat transfer and simulate pipe networks.
Calculating Flow Through an Orifice Using ASME MFC-3M-1989 and Irrecoverable Pressure Drop Equations
Recently, a customer calculated the mass flow rate of a fluid through an orifice using both the ASME standard MFC-3M-1989 and AFT Arrow. He was puzzled when this mass flow rate calculation differed by approximately 100 lbm/hr between the two methods, so he reached out to AFT for help in determining the reason for the discrepancy. The answer for the difference in flow rates on a basic level is that these two calculations are, fundamentally, not the same thing; ASME correlates differential pressure at pressure taps for purposes of flow measurement, while AFT Fathom and Arrow calculate the irrecoverable pressure drop...
Unless you happen to be marooned somewhere on Jupiter or beyond it has been hard to miss all the talk about Mars in recent days and weeks. What actually is on Mars? Water? Life? Can we send humans to Mars? Should we send humans to Mars? If we can and should, how can and should we do it?
Mismatched fluid handling machinery and the systems they service are a frequent occurrence in industrial, municipal and commercial fluid transfer installations. And, as I found out this morning, in residential installations. Specifically, in the residential installation in which I personally live.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog article about the features, functionality, and how to use the Scenario Manager effectively in order to help the engineer save lots of time. In this article, I'm going to demonstrate a practical example of how it is possible to setup 12 different scenarios and run them in less than 10 minutes! The important thing to pick up from this practical example is the thought process on how to setup the scenario tree in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Consider the system below in Figure 1 where three liquid hydrocarbons at cryogenic conditions including...
Well, if the answer is "more than one", then you are probably struggling to deal with way more model files than you need to be. With all AFT products, the Scenario Manager is an incredibly powerful feature that allows one to model several different cases within a single model file. This includes different operating conditions, multiple pump configurations, different piping, system expansions, hot days, cold days, insulation, fouling and pipe scaling, etc. The list of different cases that can be modeled is essentially endless! So, I have said it once, and I will say it again...The Scenario Manager is one of...