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...
With 54 peaks over 14,000 ft (4270 m) in elevation, the state of Colorado has many ways to get high. And rich. Once upon a time the path to riches was found underground, not on the peaks. During the 1870's mining towns began to emerge in Colorado. Colorado was definitely the "wild west" during those days! The mines operated over the next 20-30 year...
While thinking in terms of pressure is often intuitive for engineers, thinking in terms of head can be more challenging. You may be surprised by the number of cases and questions that come to the support team here at AFT about the basic definition of head, and how it relates to hydraulic modeling. Let's get back to the basics with how head is defin...
Nations handle the interaction between their government and the business/industry sector differently. Earlier in life I was firmly of the belief that governments should not interfere with business/industry as, despite the best of intentions, they typically make things worse and only add on bureaucracy without providing any net value in the end. As ...
When I wrote AFT Impulse 1 back in 1996, I slipped in an undocumented feature to make it capable of modeling the first waterhammer project I did in industry. Since then, this feature had a secret (i.e., undocumented) way of being enabled. AFT Impulse 8 will be released any day, and we have finally made this feature accessible to all. In the User Op...
In early 2020, AFT users gave us valuable feedback via our annual survey. We read and absorbed requests for additional capabilities our software doesn't yet have, as well as capabilities the software already has and users may not be aware of. Customers praised us for the prompt high-level of support our team provides, and they let us...
In June 2020, AFT's Reinaldo Pinto presented the webinar Calculating Transient Forces for Pipe Stress Analysis. The webinar focused on generating unbalanced forces due to surge in AFT Impulse and exporting them to CAESAR-II. During the webinar, 28 questions were asked. Below are the responses. Download the presentation: www.aft.com/...
I am a child of the Space Age. When I was a young boy we had one color television. On one day I was watching the original Star Trek TV series with my father (through reruns), then the next day watching the Apollo missions take men to the Moon. The fiction and reality of space travel were intermixed in my young mind of around 1970. Fast forward to t...