Performance Outlook of Thermally Insulated Systems Using Experimental Data and Computational Analysis

Abstract Thermal insulations are used for the heat conservation in the process equipment, pipelines and piping circuits. While the moisture infiltration and build-up (via condensation) trigger the risk of corrosion under insulation (CUI) and stress corrosion cracking (SCC), there are ongoing thermal losses that generally don’t get accounted for and controlled. This paper proposes a novel methodology to addresses thermal performance features of thermally insulated systems namely conventional design and contact-free insulation design, respectively via using temperature profile across the thickness of thermally insulated system. Speaking of temperatures profile, the field data was acquired from an in-service pipe to establish thermal conductivities of wet and dry insulation system, respectively. In addition, an experimental set up based on ASTM G189-21 was deployed to simulate the dry and wet insulation systems, respectively to back up the field observations. Computational modelling was performed using Finite element (FEA) simulations and was calibrated based on the field and lab data. FEA model reveals that contact-free insulation design manifests significantly lower thermal losses per unit length in comparison to conventional design with both wet and dry insulations, respectively