We recently hosted a live webinar with ITW Insulation Systems, Combat CUI: How to Combine Insulation & Jacketing to Inhibit CUI. For those of you who missed it, don’t worry! You can watch a recording of the webinar here.
Our presenters, David Shong, Regional Technical Manager from Johns Manville, and Kelly Weiss, Insulation Product & Operations Manager from ITW Insulation Systems, explored how insulation and jacketing work together to ensure your system is best positioned to inhibit CUI.
Here are 5 key takeaways from the presentation for you to consider when designing your systems.
Vapor barriers and moisture barriers are not the same thing.
A moisture barrier is a factory-applied coating or film on the interior surface of metal jacketing that is used to help prevent corrosion of the jacketing or the pipe. A vapor barrier is a film or mastic that is applied to the outer surface of the insulation. It can be factory or field-applied and is used to help prevent water absorption or moisture drive into the insulation material.
While insulation cost considerations are critical, it’s also important to keep in mind that the cost of insulation may be offset by the type of jacketing required for the application.
Non-rigid insulations tend to be less expensive than rigid insulations; however, they also require a thicker jacketing - which can eat into the cost savings of selecting a less expensive insulation. The presentation gives a high-level overview of various material cost estimates to help illustrate this point.
Johns Manville Industrial Insulation Group recently released the first water resistant calcium silicate in North America, Thermo-1200™.
This insulation was designed to shed water during a typical rainstorm, potentially helping contractors save time and money during the installation process. While the material is not hydrophobic like expanded perlite, it does repel water, making it significantly less absorptive than traditional calcium silicate. Click here to either learn more about Thermo-1200 or to request a sample.
Not all ASTM Material Specifications are “equal.”
A good example is ASTM C1617, a test to evaluate a thermal insulation material’s potential to contribute to, or to inhibit, corrosion on carbon steel. Each material is given a pass/fail standard specific to that material. For example, the material specification for calcium silicate is ASTM C533. It requires calcium silicate insulations to have a mass loss corrosion rate (MLCR) lower than deionized water (DI water) when tested to ASTM C1617. In contrast, the mineral wool and aerogel material specifications (ASTM C612 and ASTM C1728 respectively) require the materials to have an MLCR of < 5 ppm chloride. Understanding these differences can be crucial to ensuring your CUI prevention strategy is as effective as possible.
In addition to these takeaways, we had a variety of great questions at the end of our webinar that covered everything from specific application questions to the chloride content in Thermo-1200. Those exchanges are included in the presentation.
Click here to watch the full webinar and hear exactly what our industry experts had to say in response to the questions.