AFT Blog
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...
Today I flew into Houston for probably the 30th time. To many, Houston represents the fading past of an unsustainable energy monstrosity. To others it represents ingenuity, opportunity and a sort of pride at being the backbone in the development of modern civilization. The reality is we all need energy. Our ancestors built water wheels to harness e...
Evans Goodling? An engineer? Who is that? Until last month I had almost no idea. The ASME 2022 PVP conference in Las Vegas last month changed that. There I met someone who knows Goodling personally and worked with him in ASME for many years. He gave me some background on how Goodling came up with his steam hammer load prediction method. Which is wh...
As if we all need something else to worry about, right? But I am afraid it is true. The concern stems from how fast steam acoustic waves steepen as they transmit through a system. This steepening causes transient forces on the steam piping much higher than conventional methods predict. When I was beta testing AFT's latest software product, AFT xStr...