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...
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...
Happy New Year and Happy New Decade to all of you around the globe! As engineers, our society depends on us to help solve problems and make everyone's lives better. To provide power, water and heat are the basics. To provide transportation and communication are now critical technologies. Plus lots more. The unfortunate truth is that in solving the ...
Any time a rapid transient occurs in a piping system, there is a chance for unexpected surge to impact the system. Though system shutdowns account for many surge events, pump startups can cause water hammer as well. For this blog I am going to cover the basics of setting up pump and valve transients for the startup case in AFT Impulse 7, as well as...
Yes, tomorrow evening Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will open in theaters here in the USA. I am a huge Star Wars fan and bought tickets back on November 2 for a show this Friday evening, December 20. Just two more days for me! So, who cares? In this season of the pending impeachment of US President Trump, British elections and Brexit, and protes...
At this moment I am on a bullet (i.e., high speed) train from Xi'an to Beijing in China. It is a 4.5 hour trip at speeds of over 325 km/hr (200 mph). So cool! I am very fortunate. Since founding AFT 25 years ago, I have been able to travel the world and visit 30 countries. Along the way, I have made many international friends and have met many engi...
Many users enjoyed my previous blog, "Know Your Pump & System Curves – Part 1" and greatly anticipated the release of Part 2. I'm going to split Part 2 into two separate blogs: Part 2A Brief discussion on why system curves matterPump & System Curves for multi-branched piping systems§How you can have different system curves for the...