AFT Blog
Last month I presented a technical paper that was both the easiest and the hardest paper I have written. The paper was on a waterhammer accident in 2016 at an alumina refinery which caused a slurry pump to catastrophically fail. The pump casing exploded and the hot, caustic slurry it was pumping sprayed onto a technician nearby resulting in severe ...
In 2018 I attended an ASME conference where I met Igor and his son Andrii. They were the first and only Ukranians I have ever met. Both were very likeable and smart. When Russia attacked Ukraine last month I thought of them and their safety. At a conference dinner one night I was sitting next to Igor and asked him a question I often do when I meet ...
It is not the name I would have chosen. And originally it was called the Hydraulic Society when founded a little over a century ago in 1917. In 1933 it was renamed the Hydraulic Institute (also known as just "HI"). And today HI is "the global authority on pumps and pumping systems". Originally, and for many decades, one had to be a North American p...
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...
Jack, Ryan, and Sally are piloting a small research vessel on a remote river. While distracted by news of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (successful landing!), their vessel crashes and begins capsizing. After their initial panic, they are dismayed to find the collision has taken out their communications equipment.
In some quick thinking, Jack finds a printed log of ships expected to be nearby. Fortunately, there is a marine zoology expedition about a mile downriver, and our crew just needs to get an SOS out to that ship.
Initially, Jack tries simply yelling for help. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much good - and the explanation why requires some fluid mechanics.
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...
When I wrote AFT Impulse 1 back in 1996, I slipped in an undocumented feature to make it capable of modeling the first waterhammer project I did in industry. Since then, this feature had a secret (i.e., undocumented) way of being enabled. AFT Impulse 8 will be released any day, and we have finally made this feature accessible to all. In the User Op...