This blog assumes users already know how to import engineering and cost libraries into the software. If you do not, we recommend checking out this example problem from the help file. One of the lesser-known features of AFT products is the ability to cost out your entire system. By adding engineering and cost libraries to a model, AFT products are a...
As process engineers, we rarely review our own engineering process for improvement opportunities. Our job descriptions can often boil down to: "design this", "build that", and "make it better". While we can do this very well for pumps, pipelines, and flanges, sometimes we miss the intangibles such as how to improve our team's internal processes or ...
Here we go again. Robots. AI. ChatGPT. I decided it was time to talk again about how technology will destroy jobs and we will all be out of work. Again. Or not. One can look back at literally centuries of such fears and predictions about the future. While each doomsayer's fear is of a different technology relevant to their day, they have at least t...
Here we are in January and another new year has begun. You know that because of all the "predictions" being made. The old saying goes something like "even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day". Three years ago (at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) I wrote an article "Predicting the Future is Easy". My point there was that if enough p...
Users occasionally contact AFT saying they have lost their model files or cannot open them. Can you imagine spending hours, days, or months building models, and all of a sudden, the progress and work is gone?! If it happens right before a deadline, the engineer will most likely have a minor panic attack, and feelings of anger, depression, or hopele...
The last time humankind sent people to the moon was in 1972. I was still in grade school and remember well those missions to space! Now, 50 years later, there are new efforts to return to the moon. One of those efforts is the ARTEMIS rocket. ARTEMIS 1 launched on November 16, 2022. The unmanned Orion crew module splashed down this past Sunday on De...
An amusing minor coincidence happened to me in writing this President's Perspective. I have been thinking for a while about writing an update to a blog I wrote some time ago about what various world languages call the English word waterhammer. I happened to decide that this was the month I was going to update my previous blog. And when I looked bac...