E – 1904 Thermal Insulation and Refractory Material

The course is about insulation and refractory material. Thermal insulations are materials that insulate the components of mechanical systems in commercial buildings and industrial processes. In buildings, insulations are installed to improve the energy consumption of the buildings’ cooling and heating systems, domestic hot and chilled water supply, and refrigerated systems including ducts and housings.

For industrial facilities, such as power plants, refineries, and paper mills, thermal insulations are installed to control heat gain or heat loss on process piping and equipment, steam and condensate distribution systems, boilers, smoke stacks, bag houses and precipitators, storage tanks etc.

Refractory material is used to withstand high temperature and is made of inorganic, non metallic, porous and heterogeneous material, and used in high temperature applications like furnaces, metal extraction, cement making, glass making, ceramics etc.

The course discusses different insulation material, mechanism of heat transfer in insulation material, classification of insulation material, its commercially available forms, selection procedure etc. There are softwares available to select the insulation material and to decide their thickness. One such software 3E plus is discussed with an example. Course also discusses refractory material, its types and properties etc.