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...
They say that time is of the essence, and as engineers, that couldn’t ring truer! AFT pipe flow software is there to help engineers save time by more safely, efficiently, and rapidly designing and analyzing their piping systems. AFT Impulse, Applied Flow Technology’s waterhammer tool, helps engineers analyze transient incompressible flow behavior that can cause potentially detrimental pressure surges. It uses the Method of Characteristics, which requires the pipes to be sectioned using a Characteristic Grid. In this Characteristic Grid, all of the pipes are broken into an integer number of section lengths, and pressure waves are assumed to propagate through...
Twenty years ago today I was working desperately on putting the finishing touches on AFT Impulse 1.0. At the time, AFT was a pioneer in every sense of the word. AFT was the first and only company developing visual, drag-and-drop pipe flow modeling software for Microsoft Windows. And AFT Impulse was set to become the world's first visual waterhammer software for Windows. We already had orders for AFT Impulse before it was complete, such was the demand!
Previously, we talked about the Graph Guide, creating Stacked graphs and Dual-Y graphs, and visualizing the results using Animated graphs. This final installment will focus on the various ways to format graphs so they are exactly how you want them to look. In general, there are several ways to set the formatting for the various parts and regions of a graph. I will start with the model we made in the previous blog – the AFT Impulse model, ‘Pump Startup With Event Transient.imp’, which is installed in the Examples folder. Many of the formatting options are gathered together on the Formatting...
You may have heard, “there is never enough money to do it right the first time, but there’s always enough money to fix it after it’s broke." As engineers and project managers it is our responsibility to provide safe solutions to complex problems in an economy that typically gives jobs to the lowest bidder. Often these two ideas, safety and cost, seem to be at odds with each other. The more time put into insuring safety can rise costs to an unviable level and often times a “sweet spot” must be reached. One cost saving measure in piping design is to...
A little over 30 years ago I made a mistake. At the time I was a busy undergraduate student in mechanical engineering in California. Some students put together an official weekend trip for ME students to the Hoover Dam that included a special tour of the dam geared towards engineers and engineering students. I remember having tons of homework to do and decided not to go on the weekend trip. That was a mistake and I have regretted it ever since.
This week I was in Las Vegas at the 2016 MINExpo. AFT had a booth at the show and I hoped to publish this during the show and call it a "live" report. Alas I did not get it completed and the show ended yesterday. Hence it is "almost" live.
Previously, we talked about the Graph Guide and how to create Stacked Graphs and Dual-Y graphs. With AFT Impulse and with AFT Fathom’s XTS module, a great way to see how parameters change over time is through animated graphs. For the purpose of continuity, I am going to again start with the AFT Impulse model, ‘Pump Startup With Event Transient.imp’, which is installed in the Examples folder, and use the ‘One Pump Start With One Running’ scenario. In the previous blogs, we used a Stacked Graph and a Dual-Y Axis Graph to examine the pressures and flows at two valves (J6...