Let's face it, specifying every pipe size, length, elevation, pump curve and component loss in a hydraulic model can be tedious. While essential to fully defining a system, often there is avoidable redundancy during model specification. The Global Edit feature helps to ease this tedium and redundant specification by mass updating overlapping parame...

You've built a model, verified all of the inputs, and now you have results, but how are you going to organize and present these results? Here is a quick guide to some of the customization available in AFT software for displaying output and exporting your data using the Output, Visual Report, and Graph Results windows. The screenshots and examples f...

Trying to run a model and running into convergence errors? Here are a few common tips to help with model convergence for AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, and the steady state modes for AFT Impulse and AFT xStream. Though these tips will not work for all models, they have helped with many of the steady state convergence cases that have come through the AFT su...

Have you ever been working on an interesting project where you get into the zone by picking up so much momentum in the work you are doing? But then, all of a sudden you hit a brick wall in your progress and cannot help but feel the pain of all that momentum coming to a screeching halt? You are not alone, in fact, fluids experience something ve...

Non-Newtonian fluids are something almost every elementary school student is familiar with. Mixing cornstarch and water to create a liquid that acts as a solid is an experiment which has captured the attention of children (and adults) for generations. The Discovery Channel show Mythbusters even showed Adam Savage walking across a tub of cornstarch ...

Flow going backwards through a pump? Then the pump starts rotating in reverse? Where the heck is the check valve to stop the flow? These are all great questions (which I will answer later in this article). Theodore von Kármán and Robert Knapp were working on these questions in the early 1930's. Most engineering students encounter von Kármán in thei...

While thinking in terms of pressure is often intuitive for engineers, thinking in terms of head can be more challenging. You may be surprised by the number of cases and questions that come to the support team here at AFT about the basic definition of head, and how it relates to hydraulic modeling. Let's get back to the basics with how head is defin...