Often times when building larger network models, you may not be sure what the direction of the flow will be and running the model is the only way to determine the flow direction. In the below AFT Arrow model it might be hard to determine what way the flow convention is in some of the loops. After running this model there are cautions stating that flow is negative through junctions that may have loss factors that are dependent upon direction. What is the easiest way to fix this? You could compare your results, remember or make a table of what pipes...
AFT Arrow 6 was released yesterday. As usual, we have lots of cool new features to help our customers be more productive than ever.
Each AFT software product employs five Primary Window tabs in which you would build, define, and analyze the model of your system. Of these, the Visual Report window is incredibly useful in that you are able to overlay your model input or output parameters directly on top of the graphical layout of the system itself. This is an excellent feature to use when you want to provide the bottom line results to clients and colleagues at a high level (or a detailed level). Figure 1 is an example of what the Visual Report for a particular system might look like. As...
AFT software products have had powerful graphing capabilities for a very long time. Many types of graphs can be created with AFT products such as pump vs. system curves, profile plots along a flow path, gradelines and elevation profiles, transient plots (with AFT Impulse or the AFT Fathom XTS module), slurry system curves (with AFT Fathom SSL or AFT Impulse SSL modules), and selected solutions that allow you to plot various output parameters for desired pipes. All of these graphing capabilities are incredibly important to engineers as they analyze the hydraulic behavior of their system. The ability to customize the graphs...
Engineers using AFT hydraulic software (Fathom, Arrow, and Impulse) know that they are utilizing powerful flow modeling tools capable of modeling real fluid behavior in simple and complex piping networks, but many are often unaware that our software also provides a vast array of customization options that can visually aid the user’s understanding of the physical layout of the modeled system and help highlight important model components. Even though these visual options do not affect the hydraulic calculations, they can greatly improve modeling efficiency and overall model comprehension, especially if the model is shared between engineers or contains several pipes and...
One of the newest features of AFT Fathom 9 that will add a lot more efficiency to analyzing your results is the new Design Alert Manager! In addition to the new Design Alert Manager, it is also possible to add general Design Alerts for junctions such as inlet or outlet pressure, or perhaps the pressure loss across a junction. In previous versions of our software, it would be possible to create different Design Alerts for pipes where you could specify a minimum or maximum value for a particular output parameter such as a maximum pressure limit, minimum flow rate, maximum velocity,...
When I started AFT back in 1994 I had the idea to develop a product for compressible flow in pipe systems. After AFT Fathom 1.0 was released in April 1994 I began research on numerical methods for compressible flow in pipe networks. Books and papers that claimed to offer methods for compressible flow inevitably focused on single pipe applications with adiabatic or isothermal flow - and often with ideal gases. I wanted to develop a real gas software that could model heat transfer and simulate pipe networks.
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