At Johns Manville, our technical teams continually work with industrial industry experts to ensure the industry has the latest information it needs to properly specify and maintain the insulating materials that are used in industrial applications. In this effort, we initiated discussions with several major oil companies and found that they repeatedly stressed the importance of using accelerated real-world testing conditions to determine exactly how different insulating materials will fare under the rigorous demands of oil and gas applications.
As a result, in early 2016, Johns Manville contracted with an independent, third-party testing and research organization to explore long-term insulation performance under highly corrosive conditions in real-world assemblies. The third-party agency helped design, build, and test fully-insulated assemblies for corrosion under insulation (CUI) as well as thermal stability. The objective of these tests was to capture long-term insight into the corrosive potential of two different insulation types as well as the presence and severity of thermal shift. You can read a detailed review of the findings in this new Technical Bulletin, Third-Party Long-Term Testing: CUI & Thermal Results, released in January, 2017.
The use of a third-party agency provided a number of benefits, including consultation and unbiased direction when designing and conducting the tests, as well as objective review and conclusions at the completion of the test. This method of research and testing is critical to validate the credibility and objectivity of both the test methods and the findings.
The two insulations tested were Johns Manville’s InsulThin™ HT, a thin, microporous blanket, and silica aerogel, a thin, aerogel blanket insulation produced by a leading aerogel insulation manufacturer. The testing took six months to complete, during which the test assemblies were repeatedly and regularly immersed in solutions with up to 1500 ppm chloride. These tests were designed to emulate worst-case conditions at an accelerated rate, capturing the potential long-term effects of highly-corrosive environments over the course of six months.
As the year came to a close, we received the official results from the test agency, and published a detailed review of the test methods as well as the findings in three separate blogs:
The previously mentioned Technical Bulletin, Third-Party Long-Term Testing: CUI & Thermal Results, summarizes all three blogs and the results in a single technical document. This is a succinct resource you can use to quickly understand the outcome of this research, and determine what the findings mean for your applications.
Click here to read and download the new Technical Bulletin, Third-Party Long-Term Testing: CUI & Thermal Results.
If you have any questions about the new test method or the findings, we encourage you to contact our technical team at (800) 866-3234.