Cutting Costs in Pump and Pipe Sizing
AFT Fathom™ Technical Paper
Authors: Trey Walters, P.E., Applied Flow Technology
Published in Chemical Processing, June 2002
ABSTRACT
AFT Mercury* (now the Automated Netwrork Sizing Module), allows plants to achieve more cost-effective designs. Engineers can go beyond specifying their piping systems and identifying pumps that will do the job – now they can bring cost data directly into the pipe and pump-sizing process and access a new intelligent piping system design technology.
*The IntelliFlow® technology featured in this paper has since migrated from AFT Mercury and AFT Titan to become the Automated Network Sizing (ANS) Module for AFT Fathom™ and AFT Arrow™. This module utilizes similar methods to provide the cost minimization as presented in this paper.
Conclusion
A final thought It is important to note that new engineering design tools rarely, if ever, can replace engineers. Instead, engineers use the new tools to produce higher-quality designs within budget and time constraints. Piping system optimization is simply a tool that helps engineers do their jobs better than they could before. It frees up some of the time spent on the manual aspects of piping-system design, allowing engineers to focus on creative alternatives to company problems. In the author’s opinion, computer software will never replace the human engineer. It just makes the engineer better equipped — and more necessary than ever.
Designing for Multiple Scenarios
Another powerful capability of a piping system optimizer is the ability to intelligently size the system for multiple design cases. These cases could be, for example, normal and standby operation, different load requirements between summer and winter, and multiple pump-duty points. Multiple design case requirements are included as additional design constraints, and the optimum design is found to satisfy all design cases for the lowest cost.