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...
The majority of steady-state, incompressible hydraulic models made in AFT Fathom that we see as Applications engineers typically converge very rapidly. However, every once in a while, that occasional AFT Fathom model arrives in our Support inbox that just won’t converge. At first glance, passing a graduate level course in compressible flow without ever missing an exam question may seem more likely than getting to the source of the convergence issue in one of these typically-monstrous models (like in Figure 1), but the tips below show that determining and correcting the problem preventing convergence is frequently straightforward and much easier than...
Borrowing a line from Mark Twain, the death of Moore's Law has been greatly exaggerated. Many times over the years. But have the death prognosticators gotten it right this time? And, if so, what will it mean for engineers?
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You’ve built your AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow model, defined all pipes and junctions, specified your fluid properties and defined your pressure boundary conditions. But for some reason, your predicted flows are still not matching measured data. AFT Fathom or AFT Arrow is properly solving the fundamental equations, but it is likely that something is off in the inputted data. In many cases, this is the pipe’s resistance. Many factors can alter a pipe’s resistance, but the two primary reasons resistance may be incorrect is (1) corrosion of the pipe over time, which increases a pipe’s absolute roughness and (2) the buildup of residue on the walls of the pipeline, known as scaling, which decreases a pipe’s inner diameter. This decrease in diameter is very important and will increase a pipe’s resistance dramatically. Now you have a dilemma. You can’t cut open your pipe to see how much scaling there is or how much your pipe has corroded. What is the condition of your pipe? Using AFT Fathom GSC or AFT Arrow GSC, you can find out!
When I was a young engineer in the aerospace industry I frequently attended dinner meetings in the San Diego area on science and technology. At one of those meetings (in 1988 or early 1989) the featured speaker was Roger Revelle, often referred to as the father of (man-made) global warming science. Dr. Revelle passed away just a couple years later and while he was far along in years at the time, it was clear his intellect was still sharp. He spent much of his career in the San Diego area at UC San Diego and the nearby Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Amongst the vast multitude of superbly efficient features within AFT Software, the customization and Database capabilities are certainly of significant importance. If you are not familiar with how to use the Databases within our software to manage your customized information, then getting familiar should be a top priority for what you learn how to do next in our software. Making effective use of Databases will save you and your team of AFT users incredible amounts of time! The vast amounts of data that you can customize within our software includes: Components (junctions)Fluid propertiesPipe materialsPipe insulationFittings & Losses (that get lumped into...
With the release of AFT Arrow 6 last month, this month I am going to depart from my usual monthly high level focus and instead get more detailed technically on compressible pipe flow. I am going to revive a topic from 1996 where we built a "Triple Choke" steam flow model in AFT Arrow 1.0. This model is discussed in our AFT Arrow training seminars, so those of you have attended one of these will have seen it. It also has been part of the AFT Arrow Help system documentation since at least 1999.