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...
I am writing this from over 30,000 feet (actually 35,001 feet/10,667 meters according to my video map) over the Atlantic Ocean and on my way to Europe. The recent vote of the UK citizenry to leave the European Union (EU) is a hot topic at the moment (what everyone has been calling BREXIT). And I just finished reading yet another article on BREXIT. So I decided to digest some of what I have gathered in an article and here it is.
Previously, we talked about the Graph Guide and how to create Stacked Graphs. Another way to see the interactions between parameters is to show them on one graph with dual Y-axes and a common X-axis scale. 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 blog, we used a Stacked Graph to examine the pressures and flows at two valves (J6 and J9), which opened during the simulation. This time, we will put them...
Using graphs that are stacked on top of each other is a great way to see the variation of several parameters at once and how one interacts with the others. There are several ways to create stacked graphs using the new graphing features in AFT applications, which I will cover here. I am going to start with the AFT Impulse model, ‘Pump Startup With Event Transient.imp’, which is installed in the Examples folder. I am going to use the ‘One Pump Start With One Running’ scenario. We will first compare the flow and pressure in the pipe path from the Supply...
My career has been spent applying engineering principles to predict the future - specifically how actual or planned physical systems will respond in the future. Such predictions of course allow engineers to make decisions on safety, energy, environmental impact, and cost. Physical systems follow the laws of physics. Compared to other areas of human endeavor like oil, politics, and the economy, engineering is easy.
The primary way to view results when using Impulse is through graphical data. With the release of AFT Impulse 6, the power of the graphing features has been greatly increased. With this enhanced capability comes additional complexity. It is a kin to the power and complexity of in-dash radio consoles in modern cars compared to the old stereo in my old Ford Pinto. To help users navigate the new capabilities of this powerful graphing tool, we have developed a ‘Graph Guide’ which points out the steps to accomplish many of the common tasks in creating, modifying and keeping graphs. The Graph...
Safety is a primary consideration in engineering design. Safety for people is always paramount. Safety for the environment is an ever-growing focus of engineers. Any engineer worth the name would feel devastated if their engineering effort failed for some reason to protect people and the environment. One of the things engineers rely on to make system designs and operations safer are analytical tools like those developed by Applied Flow Technology (AFT). How does AFT software make the world a safer place?
AFT Impulse will be celebrating it's 20th anniversary later this year in November. I was the original software developer of AFT Impulse back in 1996 and was still actively writing code up through AFT Impulse 4. So AFT Impulse is near and dear to my heart. Within the next few days we will be releasing AFT Impulse 6 and it will have some new and extremely powerful graphing features (more on that below).