AFT Blog
I think this is the third monthly blog article I have written this year from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. Truly I do not save my monthly blogs for airplanes. I am really busy most all the time these days. Being on an international flight means having a long, forced time disconnected from the Internet and more free time than normal to write....
An article published this month in the AWWA Opflow trade magazine relates that America has a trillion dollar problem with our municipal water distribution system due to pipe failures. This information is old news to the water industry. What is novel about this article is that it suggests the issue is largely caused by waterhammer (see Stop Costly W...
Twenty-five years ago I did something I thought I would never do. My job at the time had become pretty bumpy and I was not happy. With hard work and good luck, I turned that negative experience into a new direction for me personally and professionally. That new direction involved starting a whole new company. On September 14, 1993. So, I have been ...
It is true. New Jersey is a barrier in Spain. I saw it with my own eyes. Bear with me and I will explain.
When I travel internationally I find the people, cultural and language differences fascinating. Last month I was fascinated once again. My blog last month was written while on an airplane as I travelled to Europe (see my July blog When Pipe Stress Analysis Meets Waterhammer Hydraulics: New Waterhammer Guidelines for Engineers). Before going to the ASME PVP conference in Prague (check out this video one of our staff made) I stopped in Spain for 4 days. While there I was fortunate to visit the location of an AFT Impulse project by one of our customers that was a Platinum Pipe Award Winner this year. This case study was published in April. See AFT Impulse™ Matches Data For Pumping Station Check Valve Closure. That pump station photo in the case study is where I visited. Below is a photo of me and the PPA winner David Lozano Solé of AQUATEC – SUEZ Group. For those interested, this project is being presented as a technical paper by David at the 2018 Pressure Surges Conference in Bordeax, France in November. I will be there to help and also present two other papers of my own. So where does New Jersey come into this?
I am sitting on an airplane at this moment somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and I am excited. Something that has been in the works for 22 years will happen next Monday, July 16 in Prague, Czech Republic. That is where the ASME PVP 2018 Conference will happen and I get to make a presentation.
Last year I helped AECOM, an AFT customer and AFT Impulse user, develop a set of pragmatic internal design documents for their project on handling radioactive fluid transport. Two of these documents provided their engineers guidance on interpreting and applying transient cavitation predictions.We proposed these two documents to the ASME PVP Division and they liked them enough to allow us to publish two new papers at their conference. I will be presenting these papers on behalf of AECOM and AFT.
It's time again for that discussion. Which discussion, you ask? I am talking about the discussion regarding the onward march of technology, automation and job creation and destruction. If international observers are mystified by President Trump, know you are in good company because he also mystifies many Americans. But he represents a trend that is not just American as seen by the Brexit vote and similar "national interest first" thinking in other parts of Europe and the world.
A large concern in America is the perceived decline of manufacturing in the USA. An article last month in Mechanical Engineering magazine "The State of American Manufacturing 2018" brings up some complicated issues that got me thinking.
So, let's start at the beginning.
Until a week ago, when I thought of Khalifa Tower, I thought of the Mission Impossible (Ghost Protocol) movie with Tom Cruise' death-defying action scenes hanging off the outside of the building. Now, I think of my visit there a week ago.
At 828 meters (2,717 ft) tall, Burj Khalifa (also known as Khalifa Tower) in Dubai, UAE, is the tallest building in the world – at the moment (more on that later).
As Khalifa Tower reaches to the sky physically, Dubai reaches to the sky metaphorically. I have visited about 30 countries and have never seen anything like it. Twenty years ago, there was mostly sand. And now?