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...
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...
Last week in Tucson, Arizona I attended the annual meeting of the Hydraulic Institute – the largest association of pump manufacturers in North America. There I heard about the latest updates on the fluid handling industry. Then I went on my first tour of a wastewater treatment plant and learned about how they use 2500-year-old pump techno...
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...