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...
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 ...
Unnecessary Background Codes and standards are not sexy topics, nor are they liked by the rebellious at heart. Whether you love or hate them they are a part of the world and aim to make it a safer place. One of the largest organizations to compose standards is the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). They have been around sin...
AFT strives to make our interface intuitive and user-friendly, but we know that pipe flow modeling can be complex. That's why the AFT team have worked to put together the AFT documentation portal, a new centralized place to find all of our help resources for AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, AFT Impulse, and AFT xStream. Here's a quick summary of what you can...
Be forewarned that today I am going into full on geek mode and talk about equations for transient compressible flow. These equations are in the form of hyperbolic partial differential equations (PDEs'). If that did not scare you away yet, then you may be as much of a geek as I am! With some fancy mathematics, three PDE's can be converted into six o...
Pump manufacturers often supply performance curves at a specified speed. While this is useful when the pump only runs at that rated speed, performance changes when the pump has a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD). A VFD changes the shaft speed, which, in turn, changes the performance curves. If the manufacturer only supplied a curve at a sin...
The term transient cavitation is thrown around frequently when talking about the effects that transient events have on piping systems. It is widely and correctly understood to be something that can be harmful to pipes and pipe system components, but how to predict and calculate transient cavitation is not something that is as equally understood. In...
In the modern world there are many things we take for granted – especially in first-world countries. Among them are the reliable availability of water and electricity. To our homes. To our workplaces. Just about everywhere. Engineers also take things for granted. One of those is reliable data on the properties of steam and water. But it was not alw...