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...
We have been hard at work for the last several years on the next generation of AFT software products. These new versions will extend AFT's leadership in the global marketplace and offer engineers unprecedented modeling and user interface capabilities.
May and June are the time for graduations in the USA. My third son graduated from high school this month and will be pursuing a major in Aerospace Engineering. My oldest son is finishing his third year in Mining Engineering and my second son has started into a Mechanical Engineering major. Engineering education and the future of engineering is a frequent discussion topic around our home.
AFT Arrow can be used to model various types of choking such as restriction choking, endpoint choking, and expansion choking. A useful parameter in AFT Arrow’s output is the “Sonic Flow Area” and this is the flow area in which sonic choking will occur. Comparing the sonic flow area to the actual flow area can help determine the margin between not choking and choking. The figure below provides a conceptual understanding of comparing various sonic areas to the actual flow area of a compressible system. If one defines their system such that the sonic area (ASonic,1) is less than the flow...
A frequently asked question at our training seminars - usually during a break or over lunch - is how we came up with the name "Arrow". More completely, the product is named AFT Arrow™ and it is considered by many as the world's leading compressible pipe flow modeling software product.
All of the pipe numbers in Fathom must be unique. When adding a pipe to a model, the new pipe number will be incremented based on the highest pipe number currently in the model. For example, you may only have 25 pipes on the workspace, but if the highest pipe number is 100, a new pipe will automatically be assigned number 101. After several iterations of deleting and adding new pipes, the numbering scheme may be reduced to chaos. AFT Fathom provides three tools to quickly and easily renumber pipes. They can be found in the Edit menu. The Renumbering...
A common task among pipe stress engineers is to evaluate loads on pipe systems caused by waterhammer. Since AFT Impulse 4.0 was released our users have had the ability to calculate waterhammer-induced unbalanced forces for use in any pipe stress analysis application. In addition, our users can create specially formatted transfer files for direct use in CAESAR II and TRIFLEX. However, the process of calculating such forces in AFT Impulse and then applying them in pipe stress software is not as straightforward as it sounds. Our customers have asked for assistance in this process. I have teamed with AFT's distributor in Canada...
Using “Specified Heat Rate In Constants” for the thermal model of heat exchangers can often cause problems in system models. The reason why is because this thermal model type causes the heat exchanger to act like an “assigned heat input” junction as does an assigned flow junction does for providing constant flow rates. Another problem is that this thermal model can cause unrealistic temperature changes across a heat exchanger. When the heat rate is specified and the mass flow rate and heat capacity are calculated based on the system solution, the temperature change will be whatever is required to maintain the...