AFT Blog
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When I was a young engineer in the aerospace industry I frequently attended dinner meetings in the San Diego area on science and technology. At one of those meetings (in 1988 or early 1989) the featured speaker was Roger Revelle, often referred to as the father of (man-made) global warming science. Dr. Revelle passed away just a couple years later and while he was far along in years at the time, it was clear his intellect was still sharp. He spent much of his career in the San Diego area at UC San Diego and the nearby Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
With the release of AFT Arrow 6 last month, this month I am going to depart from my usual monthly high level focus and instead get more detailed technically on compressible pipe flow. I am going to revive a topic from 1996 where we built a "Triple Choke" steam flow model in AFT Arrow 1.0. This model is discussed in our AFT Arrow training seminars, so those of you have attended one of these will have seen it. It also has been part of the AFT Arrow Help system documentation since at least 1999.
AFT Arrow 6 was released yesterday. As usual, we have lots of cool new features to help our customers be more productive than ever.
When I started AFT back in 1994 I had the idea to develop a product for compressible flow in pipe systems. After AFT Fathom 1.0 was released in April 1994 I began research on numerical methods for compressible flow in pipe networks. Books and papers that claimed to offer methods for compressible flow inevitably focused on single pipe applications with adiabatic or isothermal flow - and often with ideal gases. I wanted to develop a real gas software that could model heat transfer and simulate pipe networks.
Unless you happen to be marooned somewhere on Jupiter or beyond it has been hard to miss all the talk about Mars in recent days and weeks. What actually is on Mars? Water? Life? Can we send humans to Mars? Should we send humans to Mars? If we can and should, how can and should we do it?
Mismatched fluid handling machinery and the systems they service are a frequent occurrence in industrial, municipal and commercial fluid transfer installations. And, as I found out this morning, in residential installations. Specifically, in the residential installation in which I personally live.