This past week I and Jeff Olsen, AFT’s V.P. of Technology, attended the annual conference of the Hydraulic Institute. The Hydraulic Institute (HI) was founded in 1917 and is America’s premiere pump organization. At this year’s meeting HI held a centennial celebration.
For a technology organization like HI, 100 years is quite a feat and was rightly celebrated at the annual meeting this year. Many of you are familiar with HI through the standards HI creates. These standards show up in AFT Fathom in several places:
- Intake design (pump submergence to avoid vortex formation)
- Pump viscosity corrections
- Slurry pumps (SSL module)
Jeff and I enjoyed the sessions as well as meeting numerous users of our software who we had never met before. This included users at a large international water/wastewater design firm, a nuclear power plant in the western USA, and a traditional fossil power utility in the northeastern USA.
Two weeks before the HI centennial conference I was in Israel where I taught a training class to an AFT customer. While there I took some time to visit some of the historical/cultural sites. One day I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem which is one of the top archaeological museum in the world. The exhibits show human history going back many thousands of years. One of the exhibits was of Roman piping made of limestone which was from some 2000 years ago. Below are some photos I took.
The Roman piping I saw fascinated me and made me want to do further research on how Roman engineers accomplished what they did with the limited resources compared to the modern world. The Romans controlled and developed the known world for centuries. The Hydraulic Institute has only been around for one century. But HI standards similarly influence the entire known world. For maybe another 2000 years?
Roman piping from 2000 years ago made of limestone (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
AFT President & Founder | ASME Fellow - Trey founded AFT in 1993. He was the original developer of AFT Fathom (including the GSC and XTS modules), AFT Arrow and AFT Impulse. He was active in software development until 2011 and still works with the development team in addition to managing AFT. He has taught hundreds of training classes on AFT’s software products in twelve countries across every populated continent. He worked previously for General Dynamics in cryogenic rocket design and Babcock & Wilcox in steam/water equipment design. He holds a BSME (1985) and MSME (1986), both from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a registered Professional Engineer.