AFT Blog
Hello AFT readers! It has been quite a while since I have written a blog for you all. I had a recent discussion with a user and discovered a couple pain points that may be common. We did not have any blogs on the topics yet and I figured it was time to get back in the game and write another blog for our readers! The pain points were: 1. Modeling sy...
In district heating projects, hot water is the most commonly used heating medium. In order to ensure the user's heat load requirements, it is necessary to analyze and calculate the flow balance of the entire district heating system to ensure that different cases can meet the requirements of end users.
AFT Fathom is practical fluid dynamic simulation software used to calculate pressure drop and flow distribution in liquid piping and ducting systems. I think AFT Fathom is a great choice for district heating projects.The district heating network model of this project is bigger, and it includes the long supply line and return line, several booster pump stations, about 50 end users(exchangers), many control valves. This project has been running for 2 years, but some end user cannot get enough heat, so the owner hope us to get the reason.
Tip: If you know how to use AFT Fathom, then you are over the learning curve by about 90% when it comes to knowing how to use AFT Arrow, and about 80% of how to use AFT Impulse. One of the best advantages to AFT software tools is they offer a full solution for any single-phase pipe flow analysis calculations. Whether you are dealing with liqui...
AFT Applications have long had several options for the export of output data. Data can be directly copied and pasted into other Window's applications, and entire sections of the output can be exported to preformatted, delimited, or Excel formats. However, these options can be inflexible or require significant overhead. AFT Fathom 10 is introducing ...
What is BEP & why is it important? Every pump has an ideal range of operation where the pump is most efficient. The peak of the efficiency curve is known as the best efficiency point (BEP). Determining how far your pump is operating from its BEP is critical to increasing pump reliability and efficiency as well as meeting API 610 recommendations. AFT Fathom models pump curves with efficiency data and will determine the margin between the simulated operation of the pump and the actual best efficiency point. Our friends at Empowering Pumps shared an article titled, "Some Effects of Operating Pumps Away from Best Efficiency Point" which...
What comes to mind when you hear the expression “planning for failure”? For some, it carries the negative connotation that failure is the direct result of a design – intentionally or otherwise. Benjamin Franklin said; “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” and I believe he would agree that any good plan addresses potential failures. In fact, not "planning for failure" as an element of a system is essentially failing to plan and therefore inviting unexpected and unmitigated failures. Life Cycle Cost One of the many reasons to avoid failure when possible is to reduce cost. When a...
AFT Fathom and AFT Arrow both have the powerful ability to model heat transfer in pipes and heat exchangers, allowing you to represent these critical features of temperature-sensitive systems in your hydraulic model. However, without being able to see the affect heat transfer has on an entire system these features would be of limited usefulness. One of the most powerful aspects of AFT’s implementation of heat transfer is that energy is balanced across the entire system. For example, you can observe changes in pump or control valve operation when adding heat transfer to a remote part of a system. Looking at...