AFT Blog
Safety is a primary consideration in engineering design. Safety for people is always paramount. Safety for the environment is an ever-growing focus of engineers. Any engineer worth the name would feel devastated if their engineering effort failed for some reason to protect people and the environment. One of the things engineers rely on to make system designs and operations safer are analytical tools like those developed by Applied Flow Technology (AFT). How does AFT software make the world a safer place?
AFT Impulse will be celebrating it's 20th anniversary later this year in November. I was the original software developer of AFT Impulse back in 1996 and was still actively writing code up through AFT Impulse 4. So AFT Impulse is near and dear to my heart. Within the next few days we will be releasing AFT Impulse 6 and it will have some new and extremely powerful graphing features (more on that below).
You’ve built your AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow model, defined all pipes and junctions, specified your fluid properties and defined your pressure boundary conditions. But for some reason, your predicted flows are still not matching measured data. AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow is properly solving the fundamental equations, but it is likely that something is off in the inputted data. In many cases, this is the pipe’s resistance. Many factors can alter a pipe’s resistance, but the two primary reasons resistance may be incorrect is (1) corrosion of the pipe over time, which increases a pipe’s absolute roughness and (2) the buildup of residue on the walls of the pipeline, known as scaling, which decreases a pipe’s inner diameter. This decrease in diameter is very important and will increase a pipe’s resistance dramatically. Now you have a dilemma. You can’t cut open your pipe to see how much scaling there is or how much your pipe has corroded. What is the condition of your pipe? Using AFT Fathom GSC or AFT Arrow GSC, you can find out!
Amongst the vast multitude of superbly efficient features within AFT Software, the customization and Database capabilities are certainly of significant importance. If you are not familiar with how to use the Databases within our software to manage your customized information, then getting familiar should be a top priority for what you learn how to do next in our software. Making effective use of Databases will save you and your team of AFT users incredible amounts of time! The vast amounts of data that you can customize within our software includes: Components (junctions)Fluid propertiesPipe materialsPipe insulationFittings & Losses (that get lumped into...
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.
Often times when building larger network models, you may not be sure what the direction of the flow will be and running the model is the only way to determine the flow direction. In the below AFT Arrow model it might be hard to determine what way the flow convention is in some of the loops. After running this model there are cautions stating that flow is negative through junctions that may have loss factors that are dependent upon direction. What is the easiest way to fix this? You could compare your results, remember or make a table of what pipes...
Each AFT software product employs five Primary Window tabs in which you would build, define, and analyze the model of your system. Of these, the Visual Report window is incredibly useful in that you are able to overlay your model input or output parameters directly on top of the graphical layout of the system itself. This is an excellent feature to use when you want to provide the bottom line results to clients and colleagues at a high level (or a detailed level). Figure 1 is an example of what the Visual Report for a particular system might look like. As...