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...
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...
You've built a model, verified all of the inputs, and now you have results, but how are you going to organize and present these results? Here is a quick guide to some of the customization available in AFT software for displaying output and exporting your data using the Output, Visual Report, and Graph Results windows. The screenshots and examples f...
Last week I got back after three weeks in East Africa – my first international travel since the COVID-19 pandemic started. I had some out-of-the-ordinary encounters with fluid flow. So, I decided this month to depart from my usual tech-centric format and have some fun. Here are some brief topics I will discuss and a few photos I took… Open Channel ...
Veteran AFT software users are familiar with heritage products like AFT SteamCalc and AFT Chempak Viewer. Some have wondered where these products went. Although licenses to these products are no longer sold, these viewers are now integrated into the main applications for each of AFT's main products: AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, AFT Impulse, and AFT ...
It is not the name I would have chosen. And originally it was called the Hydraulic Society when founded a little over a century ago in 1917. In 1933 it was renamed the Hydraulic Institute (also known as just "HI"). And today HI is "the global authority on pumps and pumping systems". Originally, and for many decades, one had to be a North American p...
Trying to run a model and running into convergence errors? Here are a few common tips to help with model convergence for AFT Fathom, AFT Arrow, and the steady state modes for AFT Impulse and AFT xStream. Though these tips will not work for all models, they have helped with many of the steady state convergence cases that have come through the AFT su...