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...
Over the past few months, I've gotten to help Impulse users from around the world with their models. One of the most common problems I run into while helping them is runtime. A good rule of thumb I try to use is that most Impulse models should take less than 10 minutes to run, and none should take more than a half hour to run. Longer runtimes mean ...
Every year countless people make predictions on a countless number of things. For example, every year there are people who predict a financial crisis of some kind. There are people who predict significant natural disasters. And there are people who predict a health crisis – such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. When one of these unusual events act...
With new versions of Fathom, Arrow, and Impulse being released, we've been taking time to highlight some of the new features that have been added in. Recently, we've looked at multi-scenario pump vs. system curves, along with more general overview of our new features. In this blog, we'll look at one of my favorites, the new Scenario Comparison tool...
Like most of you, I have no expert advice to give related to the current worldwide pandemic caused by COVID-19 – also known as the Coronavirus. Thus, I won't presume to offer advice or wisdom on that topic. But everyone is talking about, reacting to and being affected by the pandemic. It seems almost insensitive to not acknowledge that. As the Pres...
Pump vs. system curves provide an intuitive, graphic way to understand how a pump interacts with a piping system. These can be useful during pump sizing, but can also be informative when your pump must function in a variety of operating conditions. Understanding how changes to your pump or system affect your operating point can be invalua...
Sometimes you just get lucky. When I accepted my first engineering job, I only knew that I wanted to work on fluid and thermal engineering. And wow did I ever get to do that! I was fortunate to work on a wide variety of applications in fluid and thermal behavior in cryogenic rocket design. Super cool. But I got lucky in another even more important ...
Recently AFT announced our new release of Fathom 11. With our new release we have been working hard to create a more robust and faster version of Fathom. Along with improved performance we have added several new tools that have been requested by customers. Here is a quick summary of the top 5 new features that you can look forward to in Fath...