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...
You have just received a pump curve from a manufacturer to use in modeling your piping system. However, the pump manufacturer only tested their pump with water while your system fluid has a density that is different than water. These differences need to be accounted for with your flow model as well. This may sound like a bit of a daunting task up front. But there is good news! In AFT Fathom 8 and AFT Impulse 5, there are two very helpful features that will allow you to easily account for these differences with no trouble at all! The pressure rise...
News on the development of drones (also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs - or UUVs if underwater) is on the rise. The applications for UAV technology to support engineering activity seem endless. However, as with all new technologies, UAVs can potentially negatively interfere with pre-existing operations, laws and regulations, general accepted practice, as well as common decency.
Within the world of pumping system specialists there is a wide range of areas of domain expertise. I was reminded of this earlier this month while attending the AFT Calgary User Group meeting sponsored by AFT's Canadian channel partner. One of the invited speakers, Jordan Grose of Beta Machinery, used several areas of domain expertise to solve a waterhammer problem in the field. I will discuss more about Mr. Grose's presentation later in this article.
I recently had the opportunity to travel to one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world – Easter Island or Rapa Nui in the native tongue. The nearest inhabited island (of only 50 residents) is 1,289 miles (2,075 km) away. Santiago, Chile, is 2,337 miles (3,761 km) away – slightly less than the distance between New York City and Los Angeles. The history of the people who have inhabited the island for more than a thousand years is interesting, and serves as a reminder to us on several levels. The island is famous for the large statues called moai....
Use of software on nuclear safety systems requires a higher level of validation than normal industrial systems. AFT Arrow has been validated for such use on nuclear safety systems. This means that modeling of steam and other gas systems in safety related work can now be performed with AFT Arrow.
Several generations of engineers ago engineers realized that performing calculations on gas flow is a lot more difficult than for liquids. As a result, the bulk of what is gas flow engineering history has revolved around how to treat gases as liquids. Another large portion of history is how to simplify gas flow equations down to simple isothermal relationships. In other words, the majority of gas flow engineering historically is about how to take short cuts with gas flow calculations.
With the release of AFT Fathom 8 and AFT Impulse 5, there is an incredibly useful new feature available on the Workspace called the "Quick Access Panel". This feature allows you to quickly and easily work with several useful features of the software in one area such as the Scenario Manager, Pipe and Junction Inspection, Workspace Overview Map, the Checklist, and ability to activate the add-on modules. Scenario Manager Access to the full Scenario Manager capabilities exists in the Quick Access Panel. Add new scenarios, clone scenarios, promote scenarios, re-order scenarios, add notes for scenarios, etc. Properties The Properties tab in...