AFT Blog
What booth and why does it have waterhammer? Come find out! In a few weeks, AFT and yours truly will be at the Turbomachinery and Pump Symposia (TPS) in Houston – September 10-12 to be precise. We will have a booth (#2824 for those who are coming). And we will have waterhammer. Not just waterhammer software. We have that every year and, as in previ...
I have received questions from clients using AFT Impulse where they ask something like "I closed this valve. Why is the maximum pressure spike way over there and not at the valve?" This comes from years of developing a "common sense" adapted to steady-state flow. With steady flow, a change between states of equilibrium has a local effect that...
An article published this month in the AWWA Opflow trade magazine relates that America has a trillion dollar problem with our municipal water distribution system due to pipe failures. This information is old news to the water industry. What is novel about this article is that it suggests the issue is largely caused by waterhammer (see Stop Costly W...
I am sitting on an airplane at this moment somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and I am excited. Something that has been in the works for 22 years will happen next Monday, July 16 in Prague, Czech Republic. That is where the ASME PVP 2018 Conference will happen and I get to make a presentation.
Last year I helped AECOM, an AFT customer and AFT Impulse user, develop a set of pragmatic internal design documents for their project on handling radioactive fluid transport. Two of these documents provided their engineers guidance on interpreting and applying transient cavitation predictions.We proposed these two documents to the ASME PVP Division and they liked them enough to allow us to publish two new papers at their conference. I will be presenting these papers on behalf of AECOM and AFT.
The time was almost 30 years ago and it is fair to say I was not quite out of the "still wet behind the ears" stage for an engineer. I had been working in industry for about three years and I was just given a project that would change my career direction and, in fact, my life. The project? I was assigned to evaluate a new concept Pogo suppressor on a cryogenic rocket engine liquid oxygen (LOX) feedline.
This week was not a typical week for me. For the first time in 30 years I found myself in not one, not two, but three university classrooms. Each classroom was in one of Colorado's excellent engineering schools.
I had a chance to come face-to-face with about 140 students in classrooms this week and several professors. A number of positive things came of the week which I will summarize below.
Pulsation in fluid systems...Is it steady-state or is it transient? Well, it is both. Kind of. Pulsation causes periodic transients that are regular in nature and thus considered steady-state. It can be called "steady-state pulsation".