AFT Blog

Denver is now ranked No. 4 worldwide in a survey of "up-and-coming' energy cities for oil and gas professionals, according to industry website Rigzone.com.  Denver was the only U.S. city to make the list.  As expected - Dubia, Calgary and Rio de Janeiro were the top three. Surprised? Don't be.  Even though Houston is considered the oil and gas capital of the world, some prefer to live and work in the mile high city, which has access to the Rocky Mountains, beautiful weather and yes, the home of the Denver Broncos. Not only does Denver have a strong engineering community concentrated...

With AFT products , the Scenario Manager is an incredibly powerful feature that allows one to model several different cases in only one model file.  This includes different operating conditions, multiple pump configurations, different piping, system expansions, etc.  The list of different cases to model is essentially endless! Now, what if you have a single system and you would like to quickly model several cases where perhaps only a few parameters are changing?  You can start by building a single system on the Workspace.  Then you can use the “Duplicate Special” feature in the Edit menu to duplicate the entire system...

Recently Steve Ballmer announced that he would step down as CEO of Microsoft sometime in the next 12 months. He has had mixed success with both fans and critics over the past 13 years. We depend on Microsoft Windows and development platforms for our business here at Applied Flow Technology. This led me to think about our company, its evolution and direction. Trey Walters has guided the growth of AFT from its inception as company run from his basement to a recognized leader around the world for delivering high-quality applications, technical support and consulting services in the area of flow analysis....

If you have a system where there are several area changes throughout the piping, modeling every single area change and connecting pipes can become taxing and time consuming.  Also, the more pipes and junctions that are in a model, the higher the complexity. With AFT software , it is very simple to include the area change losses in the pipes themselves! As seen in the Pipe Fittings and Losses screen shot below, there are four area change types that can be used and either abrupt or conical shapes can be modeled.  The key to determining which expansion or contraction type to...

Many of our customers find it interesting that the foundational code developers at AFT are former rocket engineers. Jeff Olsen and I wrote the bulk of AFT Fathom ™,  AFT Arrow ™, AFT Impulse ™, AFT Mercury ™ and AFT Titan ™ from 1993-2003. Jeff is currently AFT's Vice President of Technology. We both hold B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Jeff and I worked together at General Dynamics Space Systems Division in San Diego, California in the late 1980's and early 1990's. I worked there from 1986-1992 on cryogenic rockets on what came to be known as the Atlas I , Atlas II...

AFT Fathom 8 has a new and improved method for predicting system pressures that involve laminar flow or non-Newtonian fluids.  The Adjusted Turbulent K Factor (ATKF) method is used to apply corrections to pipes and components involving these special flows.  The ATKF method can be enabled on the System Data tab in the System Properties window. Clicking on the question mark next to the ATKF method will access the AFT Fathom 8 Help Content that discusses the ATKF method in detail. In September 2012, Applied Flow Technology and DuPont published a technical article for the International Pump Users Symposium that discusses...

Resource planning for engineering projects can often be a challenge.  Just when you’ve finished finding projects for all of your staff, an unexpected client call occurs which requires immediate additional technical personnel.  Or, your best fluid flow engineer has recently left the company – just in time for you to be awarded a large integrated team engineering project in which they were proposed to play a key role.         Purple Mountain was originally founded to provide consulting support for AFT software products  and has since evolved to assist clients with a broad range of fluid flow challenges. If...