AFT Impulse: A Quarter Century as a World Leader

A few weeks ago, a major milestone was passed when AFT Impulse experienced it's Silver Jubilee - which is another word for 25^th Anniversary. On November 21, 1996, AFT released the world's first visual waterhammer modeling software for Windows. This is significant for a few reasons including a reminder to me that I am getting really old! At the moment, we are working hard on putting the finishing touches on AFT Impulse version 9. Below I will summarize some of my favorite moments in Impulse history.

I will not repeat here what I said five years ago, but for those interested see my blog AFT Impulse 20th Anniversary: A Perspective From the Original Impulse Developer.

I want to avoid as much as possible my list of favorite moments sounding too self-congratulatory and prefer it to come across as more personal. Because Impulse is personal to me. As I was the original developer, I gave "birth" to Impulse and it feels like one of my children. If you are really bored you can read about all the new features in all the new versions here: Impulse Historical New Features.

Version 2 in year 2002 – The inclusion of a built-in Steady-State Solver to initialize the waterhammer transient, and Scenario Manager (which changes everything about how one does modeling and no other company has - to this day). I am the one who implemented the Steady-State Solver in Impulse.

Version 3 in year 2003 – Graphing animation features added for first time. I programmed this myself.

Version 4 in year 2007 – Calculating imbalanced forces caused by waterhammer. Version 4 was delayed for at least six months as we wanted to add this highly requested feature. We believed the conventional methodology used by engineers at the time was flawed and we developed an improved methodology. This new methodology took us six months to assess and implement. Expect to see two new technical papers on this topic (which I will be co-authoring) at the 2022 ASME PVP conference next July: "Accurately Predicting Transient Fluid Forces in Piping Systems – Part 1: Fundamentals and Part 2: Applications".

Version 5 in year 2013 – Major interface revamp for new Visual Basic DotNet development platform which included robust support for dual monitors, tabbed Primary Window access, new Quick Access Panel, and the first (and still only) commercially available tool to model settling slurry pipeline waterhammer in the SSL module.

Version 6 in year 2016 – Major enhancement to graphing capabilities including stacked graphs and secondary Y-axis graphs. And animations can be saved into MP4 and QuickTime video file formats.

Version 7 in year 2018 – Addition of isometric grid model building to the Workspace, addition of the new Excel Export Manager and addition of file importing from CAEASR II, PCF files and EPANET.

Version 8 in year 2020 – Multi-scenario graphing and input data comparisons across multiple scenarios.

Version 9 in year 2022 – Keep an eye out for new features in Impulse 9 in Q1 2022!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to all of you!