AFT Blog

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.

Here at AFT we are always looking for more ways to bring more convenience and accuracy to our model files. One of the ways we are doing this is with NIST REFPROP, the new fluids database that we have incorporated into AFT Fathom 10 and is coming soon in AFT Arrow 7 and AFT Impulse 7. Unlike Chempak, REFPROP is included at no additional cost to users. In this blog I will highlight a few reasons why you may want to take advantage of this database.

It's time again for that discussion. Which discussion, you ask? I am talking about the discussion regarding the onward march of technology, automation and job creation and destruction. If international observers are mystified by President Trump, know you are in good company because he also mystifies many Americans. But he represents a trend that is not just American as seen by the Brexit vote and similar "national interest first" thinking in other parts of Europe and the world. 

A large concern in America is the perceived decline of manufacturing in the USA. An article last month in Mechanical Engineering magazine "The State of American Manufacturing 2018" brings up some complicated issues that got me thinking.

So, let's start at the beginning.  

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?