AFT Blog

You have just finished designing your system and built a model of your system in AFT Fathom and have convinced your team and the client that the system will achieve all the desired pressures, flow rates, and temperatures.  The next big question is, “How much will this system cost?”  With AFT Fathom, you have the ability to answer that question in great detail! You can easily determine the full cost of pipe materials and system components!  Not only that, but you can quickly figure out how much it will cost to install and operate the entire system!   You will even be...

There are two good reasons you should care that Applied Flow Technology is celebrating it's 20th anniversary this year.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct conveys water from the Owens River in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains to the city of Los Angeles. The system provides 80% of the water to Los Angeles. Part of the aqueduct system travels through the 5.5 mile (9 km) Elizabeth Tunnel. The San Andreas fault cuts across the tunnel and a major earthquake at this location has the potential to cut off this water supply to the city for over a year.

AFT Fathom can EASILY size valves AND orifice plates with a SINGLE Control Valve junction!  There is no need to perform strenuous hand calculations to determine a valve Cv or an orifice diameter.  Just specify the system boundary conditions, pipe input properties, and the desired flow rate (or pressure) and AFT Fathom will calculate the Cv, K factor, and equivalent orifice diameter/area for you all at once! Figure 1 illustrates a control valve junction at the location of a valve or an orifice plate.  For known flow, use a Flow Control Valve (FCV).  For known upstream pressure, use a Pressure Sustaining...

With AFT products, the Scenario Manager is an incredibly powerful feature that allows one to model several different cases in only one model file.  This includes different operating conditions, multiple pump configurations, different piping, system expansions, etc.  The list of different cases to model is essentially endless! Now, what if you have a single system and you would like to quickly model several cases where perhaps only a few parameters are changing?  You can start by building a single system on the Workspace.  Then you can use the “Duplicate Special” feature in the Edit menu to duplicate the entire system and...

If you have a system where there are several area changes throughout the piping, modeling every single area change and connecting pipe can become taxing and time consuming.  Also, the more pipes and junctions that are in a model, the higher the complexity. With AFT software, it is very simple to include the area change losses in the pipes themselves! As seen in the Pipe Fittings and Losses screen shot below, there are four area change types that can be used and either abrupt or conical shapes can be modeled.  The key to determining which expansion or contraction type to use...

Many of our customers find it interesting that the foundational code developers at AFT are former rocket engineers. Jeff Olsen and I wrote the bulk of AFT Fathom™, AFT Arrow™, and AFT Impulse™ from 1993-2003. Jeff is currently AFT's Vice President of Technology. We both hold B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering.