Joseph Toumanios | Mechanical Engineer

A perpetual problem associated with steam pipes is heat loss in transit.  Not enough insulation and the pipe can burn anything that comes in contact with it.  Too much insulation and the material begins to operate as a fin, cooling the pipe too much.  This simulation runs steam through a pipe with preset insulation.  The intent was to calculate the heat loss and determine if that was an acceptable amount.  Doing so required manually setting the conduction and convection coefficients, and left Ansys 17.2 to solve the rest.  As I had hoped, the heat loss was determined to be inconsequential to the overall pipe.