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...
Improve Safety & Accuracy in Pipe Force Predictions ASME B31 piping code requires engineers to consider loads on pipes from waterhammer, steam hammer and other fluid transients. In principle, this means using Newton's Second Law which he published over three centuries ago. In 1687 to be specific. And in Latin if you want to read it in its...
Today I flew into Houston for probably the 30th time. To many, Houston represents the fading past of an unsustainable energy monstrosity. To others it represents ingenuity, opportunity and a sort of pride at being the backbone in the development of modern civilization. The reality is we all need energy. Our ancestors built water wheels to harness e...
Evans Goodling? An engineer? Who is that? Until last month I had almost no idea. The ASME 2022 PVP conference in Las Vegas last month changed that. There I met someone who knows Goodling personally and worked with him in ASME for many years. He gave me some background on how Goodling came up with his steam hammer load prediction method. Which is wh...
As if we all need something else to worry about, right? But I am afraid it is true. The concern stems from how fast steam acoustic waves steepen as they transmit through a system. This steepening causes transient forces on the steam piping much higher than conventional methods predict. When I was beta testing AFT's latest software product, AFT xStr...
AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, AFT Impulse, and AFT xStream all have a tab in the Pipe Properties window called "Fittings & Losses" which allows users to quickly specify K factors for components within a pipeline such as valves, elbows, and area changes. The Fittings & Losses allow you to simplify your model and avoid workspace clutter by inte...
I love post-apocalyptic movies. My first introduction to the genre may have been the original Planet of the Apes I watched with my father as a young child. Today I will admit to really enjoying The Walking Dead. Most of these shows assert a disaster happened that was often man-made. While Hollywood scares us in an entertaining fashio...
The price of gasoline is at a record high. What is going on? How long will it last? Unlike in recent years, today there are some easily identifiable world events and trends causing this. And refining is a big one. That is the main reason that refining company Valero Energy has the second-best growth among S&P 500 stocks in 2022 (as of May ...