AFT Blog
The Opposite of Good Vibrations - Evaluating FIV, AIV, FIP Guidelines from AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow
Learn how to use AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow to help calculate the Likelihood of Failure (LOF) for Flow Induced Vibration (FIV), Acoustic Induced Vibration (AIV), and Flow Induced Pulsation (FIP) in accordance with Energy Institute Guidelines to avoid v...
It's a Pump! It's a Turbine! It's a Pump as Turbine!
Pumps and turbines may serve opposite purposes, but fundamentally, they operate under the same principles. Both pieces of equipment convert between usable work and fluid energy, and both often use an impeller to make the conversion. Differences betwe...
What Is Transient Analysis?
You're tasked to perform a transient analysis of a piping system and it would be really helpful if there was a good software tool out there to help you. Well, you've come to the right place because AFT has great solutions! ...
Know Your Pump & System Curves - Part 3
In the final "Know Your Pump & System Curves" blog series, I am going to discuss the complexities behind pump vs. system curves for systems with pumps in series and parallel configurations. Multiple pumps in series configurations are relatively s...
Digital Twin – Identical or Fraternal?
When I was a child, I was jealous of twins. I thought how cool it would be to have a twin. I had twin cousins a few years older than I was that I saw on a frequent basis. I always got them confused. Which one was Roger, and which one was Ronny? A buz...
That Valve’s Got Character – Applying Pre-defined Characteristic Curves
Valves are often oversimplified during modeling. Understandably, defining a valve with its range of Cv at various open percentages requires much more information than an engineer may have during the initial design phase. However, just like handbook d...
Until a week ago, when I thought of Khalifa Tower, I thought of the Mission Impossible (Ghost Protocol) movie with Tom Cruise' death-defying action scenes hanging off the outside of the building. Now, I think of my visit there a week ago.
At 828 meters (2,717 ft) tall, Burj Khalifa (also known as Khalifa Tower) in Dubai, UAE, is the tallest building in the world – at the moment (more on that later).
As Khalifa Tower reaches to the sky physically, Dubai reaches to the sky metaphorically. I have visited about 30 countries and have never seen anything like it. Twenty years ago, there was mostly sand. And now?
Tip: If you know how to use AFT Fathom, then you are over the learning curve by about 90% when it comes to knowing how to use AFT Arrow, and about 80% of how to use AFT Impulse. One of the best advantages to AFT software tools is they offer a full solution for any single-phase pipe flow analysis calculations. Whether you are dealing with liqui...
In recent years, engineering efforts have been increasingly focused on analyzing and preventing detrimental pulsations in pipelines. One major source of these pulsations is caused by acoustical resonance. Undesirable acoustical resonance happens when pressure pulses (the source of which is often a positive displacement pump) excite the system's nat...
Have you ever wanted to show the three-dimensional nature of your piping system in AFT applications? Maybe you are building a model from an isometric reference drawing. Or maybe you are incorporating your model into a report and want to represent the x, y, AND z axes.
Whatever the reason may be, the great news is that AFT Fathom 10 includes a new Isometric Pipe Drawing Mode!
AFT Applications have long had several options for the export of output data. Data can be directly copied and pasted into other Window's applications, and entire sections of the output can be exported to preformatted, delimited, or Excel formats. However, these options can be inflexible or require significant overhead. AFT Fathom 10 is introducing ...
We at AFT work hard. Why?
We put a lot of thought into our software features. Why?
We try hard to listen to what you, our customers, tell us you want. Why?
The answer to all three questions is the same...
The pistons, or diaphragm of a reciprocating (positive displacement) pump causes a cyclical variation, typically in some sinusoidal form, of both flow in pressure in a piping system. The magnitude varies, depending on the type and design of the pump. What is acceleration head? Acceleration head is the energy required to change the velocity of the liquid in the system from an at rest, or zero condition, to some non-zero value. To help us understand acceleration head a little more clearly, you could compare it to a race car. In a drag race, the race car will accelerate to some maximum velocity,...