Multi-scenario graphing and animation in AFT Impulse

Really? Another blog about features in AFT software?

Yes, really. And there is a good reason for it. Because this new feature in AFT Impulse 8 will change your life. Well, it may not change your life, but it will forever change how you do your waterhammer analysis.

I am talking about the new multi-scenario graphing and animation feature. This brand, new feature really changes things.

Before I talk about this though, let me go back about 20 years. That is when we added a revolutionary new feature to AFT Impulse 2 (and other AFT software at that time) called Scenario Manager. Our users over the last 20 years have said Scenario Manager – just that feature alone – has been a game changer for them. And they tell us that here we are, 20 years later, and still no other engineering software comes close to this capability.

If I stopped there, and just extolled Scenario Manager in this article, I would be completely justified. But in AFT Impulse 8 we have raised the bar even further.

If you can bear with me, I want to first brag about the awesome graphing features AFT began adding to AFT Impulse since version 6 in year 2016. This allowed stacked graphs, double-Y graphs, crosshairs, a range finder, graph folders and an enhanced Graph List Manager for saving graphs for easy regeneration, plus more. We made it oh-so-easy to access all of these powerful features with the new Graph Guide back in 2016.

With that introduction of impressive features, AFT Impulse 8 now allows you to graph and animate your various scenarios within the same graph.

AFT Fathom 11 introduced multi-scenario pump vs. system curve graphs. That in itself was a very powerful new feature in AFT Fathom. But graphing in AFT Impulse has always been central – much more so than in AFT Fathom.

Want to see it with your own eyes? Here below in Figure 1 you can see five scenarios cross-plotted. Figure 2 below shows a screen shot of the same five scenarios playing an animation. It is just ridiculous.

As the original founder of AFT, way back in 1996 I wrote AFT Impulse 1, the world's first visual waterhammer modeling software for Microsoft Windows. It is really incredible to see how far this internationally leading software has come.