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...
We have all heard it countless times - "Garbage in, garbage out". As applied to engineering, and specifically to computational engineering software, the admonition is clear - we have to be certain we are properly specifying our engineering input to the software which will compute the behavior we seek to understand.
AFT Arrow solves all of the fundamental controlling equations governing gas dynamics. For more information about which fundamental thermodynamic equations are solved in AFT Arrow, here is an excellent article that discusses gas flow calculations in detail. The "stack effect" is simply one aspect of these equations, and is accounted for by the user input and boundary conditions. Ultimately, flow is driven by pressure difference. The higher you raise a chimney, the lower the atmospheric density and pressure at the discharge. In order to accurately model the "stack effect", the system boundary conditions must be modeled accurately. As the discharge...
Last month AFT concluded its 20th year as a world leading provider of fluid flow simulation software products. A year ago I wrote about AFT's 20th anniversary and the prizes we would be awarding.
Everyone - at least everyone in the USA - is talking about falling oil prices:
Previously, I wrote an article that discussed how to account for density differences between a pump manufacturer's test fluid and a system fluid for pumps as well as the importance, https://www.aft.com/blog/entry/2014/12/02/reference-densities-for-pump-operation. Both AFT Fathom and AFT Impulse can take into account these density differences very easily, thus, reducing the efforts for the user. But what about viscosity corrections? Is it important to take this into account as well? How is this accomplished? Does it really make a difference? If the system fluid you are modeling has a HIGHER VISCOSITY (more resistant to flow) than the fluid the pump was tested with,...
You have just received a pump curve from a manufacturer to use in modeling your piping system. However, the pump manufacturer only tested their pump with water while your system fluid has a density that is different than water. These differences need to be accounted for with your flow model as well. This may sound like a bit of a daunting task up front. But there is good news! In AFT Fathom 8 and AFT Impulse 5, there are two very helpful features that will allow you to easily account for these differences with no trouble at all! The pressure rise...
News on the development of drones (also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs - or UUVs if underwater) is on the rise. The applications for UAV technology to support engineering activity seem endless. However, as with all new technologies, UAVs can potentially negatively interfere with pre-existing operations, laws and regulations, general accepted practice, as well as common decency.