AFT Blog
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 ...
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...
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...
Here we are in January and another new year has begun. You know that because of all the "predictions" being made. The old saying goes something like "even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day". Three years ago (at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) I wrote an article "Predicting the Future is Easy". My point there was that if enough p...
The last time humankind sent people to the moon was in 1972. I was still in grade school and remember well those missions to space! Now, 50 years later, there are new efforts to return to the moon. One of those efforts is the ARTEMIS rocket. ARTEMIS 1 launched on November 16, 2022. The unmanned Orion crew module splashed down this past Sunday on De...
An amusing minor coincidence happened to me in writing this President's Perspective. I have been thinking for a while about writing an update to a blog I wrote some time ago about what various world languages call the English word waterhammer. I happened to decide that this was the month I was going to update my previous blog. And when I looked bac...
Improve Safety & Accuracy in Pipe Force Predictions ASME B31 piping code requires engineers to consider loads on pipes from waterhammer, steam hammer and other fluid transients. In principle, this means using Newton's Second Law which he published over three centuries ago. In 1687 to be specific. And in Latin if you want to read it in its...