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...

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/...

At the time of writing, AFT Impulse 8 is right around the corner. We are proud to boast of new capabilities to give you an even better user experience with transient analysis. AFT Impulse 8 showcases new features never seen before, and ones only hinted at with the releases of AFT Fathom 11 and AFT Arrow 8. Here, we have laid out the top 5 new featu...

Many of you are aware that AFT released the ANS module for AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow last year to help engineers minimize the cost of their system and maximize reliability. You can check out this blog I wrote last year for a quick recap on the capabilities of ANS. Let's talk a bit more about what information you need to use the ANS module by introdu...

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 ...