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...
In 2010 the Walt Disney Company created a mind-boggling new night time show called World of Color at the Disney California Adventure theme park which is part of Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. For anyone who ever doubted that flow can be fun, you need to see this show!
One of the many new features in Fathom 8 is the ability to show images in the annotation box. This simple feature will allow the engineer to easily and clearly communicate a vast array of information through the Workspace and Visual Report. To add an image to the Workspace or Visual Report, as seen above, select the Annotation tool from the toolbox. Then select the “Line/Arrow/Image” tab and specify the file path to your image. Once the image is selected, click OK. The image box shown on the workspace can be easily moved and resized.
AFT Fathom 8 began shipping last week. And we are excited. The release of AFT Fathom 8 coincided with the unveiling of our new logo, new website and newly branded material. It is not an understatement to say this represents a new era for AFT.
We at Applied Flow Technology are really excited about the new version of AFT Fathom 8 coming in September. Once our customers get their hands on it we are confident they will be equally excited. This version represents the most significant upgrade since AFT Fathom 4 was released in year 2000. It will further establish AFT Fathom as the world's leading pipe flow modeling tool.The prices are increasing soon so if you are planning to order new AFT Fathom licenses or SUM annual support do not delay. Read further for more details.The effort to move AFT Fathom from version 7 to 8 turned...
Many times when modeling heat transfer using heat exchangers in AFT Fathom, significant temperature differences across the heat exchanger can have a major impact on the accuracy of the heat transfer results. This can especially become a problem with non-linear heat capacity relationships. The heat transfer across the heat exchanger in the model below is calculated from the temperature difference across the heat exchanger and the arithmetic average heat capacity. One way to enhance the accuracy of the heat transfer results is to model the single heat exchanger junction, J2, as multiple heat exchangers as shown in the below model. The...
This article is the second in a two-part series on the future of engineering. Part 1 was discussed last month in The Future of Engineering - Part 1.
I was teaching a training class a few months ago at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and had the good fortune to get a guided tour of the space center by "Rob," one of the attendees in my class. I wrote about this tour in My 50th Anniversary Visit to the Site of John Glenn’s First American Flight Into Space.
Summary Engineers are often responsible to design systems to comply with codes and standards. In recent years codes that apply to waterhammer and surge pressures have become more prominent. Increasingly AFT Impulse is being used to help engineers comply with such codes. Once AFT Impulse has calculated the maximum pressure due to a transient event, what shall the designer do with this value? The answer to this question depends on the code that is being used as the piping design basis. In this article, we’ll be discussing how two important piping design codes - B31.4 and B31.3 - deal with surge...