The Quickest Way to Learn AFT Products

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Ben Keiser

After you receive your AFT software, you will probably wonder how to learn the software quickly so you can begin using it.  AFT provides a very handy Quick Start Guide for each software product in English Units and SI Units.  These quick start guides are short, concise, would take maybe a day of your time, and are extremely powerful to assist you in producing highly accurate and advanced models!

With larger companies, sometimes the AFT software will go straight to the IT department for installation and the engineer may never see the hard copy of the quick start guides.  Not to worry!  AFT provides PDF versions of our quick start guides when the software is installed.  One area to find the quick start guides is in the “User Guides (PDF Format)” start menu item in each AFT application folder.  The second area to find the quick start guides is from the “Help” menu from the software program itself.  Go to Help, User Guides (PDF Format), Quick Start, and then chose either English Units or SI Units.  Also, inside each AFT product folder, there is a help file that contains many more excellent walk-through examples to help build ones modeling skills even more!

The content of each quick start guide is rich with information about the fundamentals and pipe flow analysis concepts of each software product.  You will learn so much from just a few short examples in each quick start guide that you will be able to build and model complex pipe networks and analyze multiple scenarios of a project in a very efficient manner.  The quick start guides will teach you the basics of the fundamental function of pipes and junctions, how to size a pump/compressor/fan or use heat transfer in a model, how to use extremely powerful features like “Global Pipe Edit,” “Global Junction Edit,” and “Scenario Manager” which every engineer needs to know how to use to save lots of time!

From one engineer to another, I highly recommend taking a day to go through the quick start guide.  It will add so much value to your pipe-flow modeling abilities that it will be unFATHOMable as to what you will be able to do with it!

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Thankful for the Opportunity to Shape a Changing World

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Trey Walters

Wherever I go I see change. China is undergoing massive change in a relatively short period of time which has impacted Western nations both positively and negatively – as well as the rest of the world. China’s growth in manufacturing is impacting Australia in a huge way and driving much of the Australian economy through accessing its abundant natural resources.

As we look back on the American Thanksgiving holiday I am currently on a lengthy visit to Australia and Asia training customers in the East and meeting new prospects. And seeing the changes first hand. My family is along with me and we celebrated Thanksgiving in Thailand far away from our home in beautiful Colorado. I am thankful for many things among which are my family, health and access to education and resources. I also am particularly thankful at the moment for the chance to observe and participate in shaping
these changes in the world.

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the USA and some European nations is hard to precisely pin down, but one common thread relates to jobs. Another common thread is the demand for structural changes in the economic system. In western Australia no one seems to care or have time to occupy anything – their unemployment rate is near zero and they cannot find enough people to fuel their surging economic growth. The class I taught in Perth had engineers from Chile, South Africa, U.K., Iran and Vietnam who had re-located to Australia for the work. In China the demand for infrastructure projects is growing at an incredible pace to support their economic growth. Jobs too are plentiful. Thailand is a production mecca and its traditional openness to outsiders is serving it well as it attracts manufacturing work from all over the world.

We engineers of course play an integral role in the changing technology, improved efficiency and production of goods and services which impact society in so many ways. It is our responsibility to guide the world’s growth by building new systems that are reliable, safe and efficient. It is also our job to innovate. To find ways to do the next project better than before. And to develop new products and processes to make the world a better
place.

Especially in places like China and Australia where infrastructure is being put into place that will last for many years to come, it is all the more important to put into place engineering processes that promote safety, reliability and efficiency. Such infrastructure inevitably involves the transport of fluids. We work hard at AFT to provide tools which
make the transport of fluids safer, more reliable and more efficient. Engineers in the USA and internationally are seeking such tools to help them do the best job possible.

It is a truism that protesters like those in Occupy Wall Street are rarely seen in times and places where the economy is solid and opportunities are abundant. The West and the USA in particular suffered an economic shock unlike anything seen in most of our lifetimes. Jobs are not the issue per se. Who wants to support job growth in typewriter or buggy whip manufacturing? Those are dead industries of the past.

In pursuit of job creation, the key in the West and USA is quality jobs such as engineering and high-margin/high-tech manufacturing positions. The key to quality job creation will be knowledge and innovation – these will undergird the industries of the future.

Ultimately it is the engineers and knowledge professionals of the world who will create these industries. And the jobs that go with them.

 

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How to Fill as Quadratic

Posted on October 27, 2011 by John Rockey

Filters and screens impose a pressure drop that varies with flow rate. The variation is non-linear, but manufacturers will often provide only one data point for pressure loss at the design flow rate. Using a single point, or constant pressure drop, can produce significant inaccuracies in your model. With this in mind, AFT offers the “Fill As Quadratic” option for entering loss data.

 

 

Using only a single point, “Fill As Quadratic” will create two additional points for you. This first is simply 0,0; zero flow produces zero pressure drop. The second point is 2 x Flow and 4 x Pressure Drop. A curve is then fit through all three points and there you have it; a quadratic loss profile from only one data point. By using values along the curve, more realistic losses can be modeled for a wide range of flow rates.

The Fill As Quadratic feature is available in AFT Fathom, Arrow, and Impulse.

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AFT Around the World

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Jeff Olsen

In early October, I conducted a 5-day training seminar in Lima, Peru. There were seven different companies represented from Peru and Chile.

It is always interesting to see the variety of applications for AFT software and Peru was no exception where many of the engineers are involved in mining operations. Peru is a leading producer of copper, gold, silver, phosphate and potash with over $16 billion in exports in 2009. The engineers at the seminar had a variety of active project responsibilities. These ranged from long transport pipelines, to storage and transfer systems, to refining and process facilities.

The course emphasized AFT Fathom and modules, including the slurry module. The week finished with two days of training on AFT Impulse and waterhammer examples.

The ability to add custom piping and fluids interested the engineers as they use specialized components in their systems. Using the XTS and GSC modules allowed the engineers to model tanks filling and draining, valves opening and closing, and other system operations. They also focused on using Impulse to model systems and locate potential waterhammer problems. Components such as vacuum breaker valves and gas accumulators can be added to a model to evaluate their benefits.

Macchu Picchu

A View of Machu Picchu

One of the benefits of teaching seminars all over the world is being able to visit some incredible landmarks. In Peru, I spent two days visiting Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo and the Sacred Valley which was amazing. To see the natural beauty of the area with the mind-boggling engineering and architectural feats was awe inspiring.

Prior to that, in August, I traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel to conduct a 5-day training seminar for the Israel Air Force. Eight engineering officers learned fluid dynamic fundamentals and system modeling using AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow and AFT Impulse.

AFT applications are used by the Air Force on both ground-based and airborne systems. The engineers use AFT Arrow, which models gas and compressible fluids, to model the environmental systems critical to the pilot’s safety. Fuel transfer systems have been modeled using AFT Fathom. Hydraulic lines on fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft are also analyzed using AFT Fathom and AFT Impulse.

By the end of the five days, the engineers new to AFT products were building detailed models and the experienced AFT users had learned many tips and best-practices. It is always amazing to see the many different applications of our software – from large to small, either in motion or stationary, from very hot to cryogenic.

Again, I was able to visit several areas in the Holy Land including the West or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Masada. Floating in the Dead Sea in the middle of the summer (well over 100 deg F, 40 deg C) was like getting into a hot bath – I didn’t stay in long.

Contact us for more information on scheduling training classes around the world.

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Where Did the Name “Fathom” Come From?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Trey Walters

A frequently asked question at our training seminars – usually during a break or over lunch – is how we came up with the name “Fathom”. More completely, the product is named AFT Fathom™ and it is considered by many as the world’s leading pipe flow modeling software product.

The story behind the Fathom name is intimately tied to the story behind the founding of Applied Flow Technology as a company. So let’s go back to 1993.

AFT Fathom started as a hobby in 1992 while I was working in the power industry as a research engineer. But it was not named Fathom and I was not planning to start a company. As a hobby I was planning to develop a software product that did both steady-state and waterhammer calculations – all using a Windows graphical user interface. I coined a name for it that had the acronym FATHOM – Fundamental Analysis of Transient Hydraulics using Object-oriented Modeling. “Transient Hydraulics” is a more formal, academic term to describe waterhammer. I had learned to program waterhammer algorithms in my first job in the aerospace industry – in FORTRAN of course – and I wanted to put that knowledge into a GUI.

When my power industry employer started experiencing serious business issues in 1993 I decided – over a period of about a month – to start a company. And AFT was born in September 1993. But my “FATHOM” software was only half done. I had a company with no products to sell. The drag-and-drop interface used largely still used today was functional, and the steady-state solution algorithm was functional – also largely still used today. But that was about it.

So I made a couple decisions. I dropped the intent to have Fathom perform waterhammer modeling. It was going to focus just on steady-state modeling – so I could get it done and have a product to sell. And I dropped the meaning of the acronym. The software just became “Fathom”. Then I started programming like crazy!

A trademark attorney advised me to drop the “Fathom” name and instead use the name AFT Fathom. I took his advice and AFT Fathom 1.0 was completed and commercially released in April, 1994. The first license was sold in May.

At that time in 1993-1994, Microsoft Windows (version 3.1) was emerging as the future of desktop operating systems. And graphical user interfaces were emerging as the future of commercial software. Remember, it was still mostly a DOS world at that time for most engineers. There were no graphical “drag-and-drop” software products for pipe flow modeling in Windows, and AFT Fathom was the world’s first such commercial product.

For those who have an interest in trademarks, AFT Fathom is what is known as a “suggestive trademark”. Most other companies in our space choose to use descriptive trademarks that involve some combination of the words pipe, flow, hydro and net. Trying to figure who is a who is a challenge for most engineers!

The word “Fathom” connotes depth of thought and nautical measurement. But it is not descriptive. It is suggestive. We used this suggestiveness in our very first brochure for AFT Fathom back in 1994. Today the power is that engineers the world around instantly know who we are when they hear about a “Fathom model” - because of the non-literal name – and quality and depth of the product and our technical support.

Interestingly, the original acronym FATHOM which included waterhammer modeling is what our AFT Impulse™ software eventually became in 1996. But that is a story for another day…

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Save Money, Reduce Energy and Improve Sustainability with AFT

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Trey Walters

The growing emphasis on sustainable business practices and environmental responsibility has impacted AFT software in several areas.

In recent years we have added built-in capabilities to AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow to calculate energy usage and to estimate the cost to operate rotating equipment. This is available on the Analysis menu in the “Cost Settings” window.

Using AFT Fathom, TME Energy Services Division developed a model of the chilled water system at the University of Arkansas. The project realized an annual energy savings of 1.9 million KWHr and $67,000 in pumping power and $1,200,000 in annual chiller electrical and gas energy savings. Read more about how they did it here.

Further, our AFT Mercury and AFT Titan products use energy costs to drive their automated design processes. An example is the $3 million in energy costs saved on a sea water pipeline as documented in this article: Optimization of Sea Water Pumping System .

Pumps, fans and compressors use 20-40% of all electrical energy generated to run fluid handling systems. Tools like those offered by AFT can help manage and reduce their impact on our planet.

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Printing Input and Output

Posted on September 29, 2011 by David Jackson

You can print all of or select portions of your model data window in order to have a hard copy of your input. Likewise you can print all of or select portions of your output window in order to have a hardcopy of the output. Printing both of these windows allows you to have hardcopies and backups of everything you would need to perform calculation checks on your model.

After building your model and entering all of the required data, browse to the Model Data window and click “View/Model Data Control”. After setting up the input data to be displayed, click “View/Model Data Print Content.”

From this window, you can select which portions of the input data you would like to print. The process is the same for the output. After setting up the parameters you would like available, and setting up which portions of the input/output you would like to print, simply click File/Print.

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Safety

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Trey Walters

As President of AFT, I often hear from our customers about how one of AFT’s software products has helped them solve a problem or made their lives easier. Sometimes I’ll notice something in the news and think how AFT’s products COULD have helped avoid a problem. Every month, I’d like to share these insights with you in hopes that we can all work together to make our pipelines safer and more efficient.

Last week I met an AFT Impulse user at a conference and was reminded of how profoundly our products affect the safety of industrial systems. I made a presentation at an engineering conference on the imbalanced forces generated during waterhammer and how they can impact pipe structures. As many of you know, our AFT Impulse software can predict these forces and then pass them automatically to pipe stress software products like CAESAR II® and TRIFLEX®.

The customer attended my presentation and had used AFT Impulse last year to forensically model the waterhammer transients in a combustible liquid pipe system. The transient had damaged a pipe flange, caused a leak, which resulted in an explosion which destroyed the facility. I did not find out if there was any loss of life, but as we all know this is always of great concern in many industrial facilities.

I am frequently amazed at the level of misunderstanding that exists in industry on subjects like waterhammer and am concerned about the risk to human life and property. Engineering overdesign and built-in safety systems usually compensate for the misunderstandings. But not always.

Engineers have the difficult job of assessing and balancing risk and safety issues in industrial facilities. I am proud that AFT Impulse has emerged as a key tool for many such engineers to improve safety and reliability.

If you have a success story or are curious about how AFT products relate to something you hear in the news, feel free to email me at prez@aft.com

Trey

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