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...
A few weeks ago, a major milestone was passed when AFT Impulse experienced it's Silver Jubilee - which is another word for 25th Anniversary. On November 21, 1996, AFT released the world's first visual waterhammer modeling software for Windows. This is significant for a few reasons including a reminder to me that I am getting really old! At the mome...
AFT has some good news for engineers who analyze gas transients. AFT is introducing the new AFT Arrow Extended Time Simulation (XTS) Add-on Module to help engineers better calculate compressed gas flow rate changes in piping systems. This time-based simulation software allows engineers who are designing or troubleshooting industrial ...
Getting things into orbit around the earth is hard. And expensive. The privatization trend in space technologies has been ongoing for a number of years, and new technologies are reducing costs significantly. A few weeks ago Sierra Space was joined by Blue Origin, Boeing and several other organizations in releasing details of their plan to deliver a...
New versions of AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, and AFT Impulse are being released in the upcoming months. This round of releases focuses on major interface changes which will improve user efficiency. Check out these new features and improvements that will be in Fathom 12, Arrow 9 and Impulse 9. Analysis Setup To make the modelling process simple...
As you know, AFT is a developer of a world leading waterhammer simulation tool in AFT Impulse. We regularly get asked for waterhammer guidance by engineers tasked with building piping systems. While there are some excellent waterhammer resources available, there is not much decision-making content from non-commercial authoritative organizations. Th...
Let's face it, specifying every pipe size, length, elevation, pump curve and component loss in a hydraulic model can be tedious. While essential to fully defining a system, often there is avoidable redundancy during model specification. The Global Edit feature helps to ease this tedium and redundant specification by mass updating overlapping parame...
Last Friday I saw a bald eagle. Up close. The closest I have ever been to an eagle in the wild. Just off the highway sitting on a fencepost. We also saw a lot of wind turbines. And, yes, wind turbines are the foes of eagles. Which is a sad by-product of wind power technology. More on that later. Tonight the 2021 NFL football season starts. And, yes...