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...
Last month I presented a technical paper that was both the easiest and the hardest paper I have written. The paper was on a waterhammer accident in 2016 at an alumina refinery which caused a slurry pump to catastrophically fail. The pump casing exploded and the hot, caustic slurry it was pumping sprayed onto a technician nearby resulting in severe ...
When building a model in any of AFT's software all pipe and junction numbers must be unique. These pipe and junction numbers can be useful for sorting information in areas such as "Model Data" and "Output". Therefore, keeping an organized structure for these pipe and junction numbers is strongly advised. Though, like every project, unforeseen devel...
I don't have any tips for decluttering your garage or office desk, but I can offer you a tip on how to declutter your natural gas model. Perhaps it will save you some time as well in the design phase. As engineers, we like details and will enter as many as possible into our models. I've seen several AFT Arrow and xStream models with natural gas mix...
Last week in Tucson, Arizona I attended the annual meeting of the Hydraulic Institute – the largest association of pump manufacturers in North America. There I heard about the latest updates on the fluid handling industry. Then I went on my first tour of a wastewater treatment plant and learned about how they use 2500-year-old pump techno...
This blog assumes users already know how to import engineering and cost libraries into the software. If you do not, we recommend checking out this example problem from the help file. One of the lesser-known features of AFT products is the ability to cost out your entire system. By adding engineering and cost libraries to a model, AFT products are a...
As process engineers, we rarely review our own engineering process for improvement opportunities. Our job descriptions can often boil down to: "design this", "build that", and "make it better". While we can do this very well for pumps, pipelines, and flanges, sometimes we miss the intangibles such as how to improve our team's internal processes or ...
Here we go again. Robots. AI. ChatGPT. I decided it was time to talk again about how technology will destroy jobs and we will all be out of work. Again. Or not. One can look back at literally centuries of such fears and predictions about the future. While each doomsayer's fear is of a different technology relevant to their day, they have at least t...