AFT Blog
Jack, Ryan, and Sally are piloting a small research vessel on a remote river. While distracted by news of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (successful landing!), their vessel crashes and begins capsizing. After their initial panic, they are dismayed to find the collision has taken out their communications equipment.
In some quick thinking, Jack finds a printed log of ships expected to be nearby. Fortunately, there is a marine zoology expedition about a mile downriver, and our crew just needs to get an SOS out to that ship.
Initially, Jack tries simply yelling for help. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much good - and the explanation why requires some fluid mechanics.
Non-Newtonian fluids are something almost every elementary school student is familiar with. Mixing cornstarch and water to create a liquid that acts as a solid is an experiment which has captured the attention of children (and adults) for generations. The Discovery Channel show Mythbusters even showed Adam Savage walking across a tub of cornstarch ...
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 straight-forward and will be discussed briefly. Operating pumps in parallel configuration involve a f...
In this blog, we dive further into pump and system curves for complex systems. The examples include demonstrating system curves changing over time and when multiple system curves exist for a single system with multiple pumps in different locations of the system. Let us re-visit the multi-branched system example from the previo...
For gas systems flow is driven either by a pressure difference, or by a turbomachine. AFT Arrow allows users to model turbomachines such as fans, blowers and compressors. For this blog we'll talk about what differentiates these three options, and how to model them using AFT Arrow. Definitions and Types Fans, blowers and compressors all...
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 data, heuristics, and correlations, valves too can be reasonably approximated using their common char...
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...