NFPA Fluid Power Forum Podcast, iVT Expo 2026

How do you measure the air trapped inside hydraulic oil? With sonar — by listening to the fluid as it travels from reservoir to pump. Recorded live on the show floor at iVT Off-Highway Expo 2026, where NFPA's Ben Brown sat down with James Oftelie of Aeration Measurement Technologies. Entrained air is one of the least visible problems in a mobile hydraulic system and one of the most expensive. It softens response, accelerates wear, and shows up as symptoms that get blamed on everything else. The hard part has never been knowing it matters — it's been measuring it while the machine is actually running. In this conversation, James Oftelie explains the approach Aeration Measurement Technologies has brought to that problem: a passive, acoustic method that instruments the suction line and listens. Sound travels differently through aerated oil than through clean oil, so by watching how the speed of sound changes and how it attenuates between the reservoir and the pump, the system can resolve how much air is entrained — and turn it into a single aeration number you can actually design against. Because it's passive and acoustic, it works with standard transducers rather than requiring new hardware in the circuit. That opens it up to hydraulic system design, troubleshooting, optimization, test-cell work, and validating whether a reservoir is doing the job it was designed to do. Also in the conversation: what it's like exhibiting at iVT for the first time, and why trade-show networking still earns its place in a very technical industry. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE Fluid Power Forum — "From Reservoir to Pump: Measuring Aeration through Sonar Technology" https://fluidpowerforum.libsyn.com/fr... Fluid Power Forum is the podcast of the National Fluid Power Association, and is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CREDITS Guest host: Ben Brown, National Fluid Power Association Guest: James Oftelie, Aeration Measurement Technologies LLC Podcast: Fluid Power Forum, from the National Fluid Power Association @NatlFluidPowerAssn Recorded at: iVT Off-Highway Vehicle Technology Expo, Rosemont, Illinois, August 2026, alongside NFPA's Advanced Hydraulics Conference Audio courtesy of the National Fluid Power Association. Used with permission. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ MORE FROM AERATION MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGIES https://amtechllc.com Learn more about the National Fluid Power Association: https://www.nfpa.com #FluidPower #Hydraulics #OnlyFluidPowerCan #MobileHydraulics #OffHighway #NFPA #FluidPowerForum #iVTExpo #Aeration #EntrainedAir #ConditionMonitoring