Presentation: Proven CUI Mitigation with Pyrogel

In this MECOC 2026 presentation, Aspen Senior Director of Technical Services Mark Krajewski explores the causes of corrosion under insulation (CUI), the risks it poses to refinery owners and operators (reduced process efficiency, loss of containment, increased energy usage), and the science of keeping insulation dry in high-temperature environments. He also highlights how Pyrogel aerogel insulation helps mitigate CUI while enhancing thermal performance and operational efficiency.

A transcript of the presentation can be found below:

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:13:05
Today we’re talking about corrosion under insulation mitigation by using aerogel insulation products. Okay. What do we need to create?

00:00:13:07 – 00:00:39:10
Corrosion. We need water. We need metal. We need oxygen. Pretty straightforward. You’re going to, you know, there’s a bunch of great talks with far more technical details around the mechanisms of corrosion. Then we’re going to talk about today. So we’re really talking about when we get those three things in the presence of insulation we get corrosion under insulation which is super charged form of it, sometimes up to 20 times the rate you’d see.

00:00:39:10 – 00:00:50:23
Then just with the three normal constituents. Why is it such a big deal? Well, two reasons. It’s unpredictable and it can be catastrophic.

00:00:50:26 – 00:01:03:22
You know, we talked to a lot of customers around the world, and we get stories like this all the time. You know, one German petrochemical company told us that at one site they have 50 CUI related events a year.

00:01:03:25 – 00:01:16:11
Another international oil company, American based, US based company, told us they have a loss of containment a day event every day from CUI, pretty scary stuff

00:01:16:18 – 00:01:38:13
Mark, there was today a guy from Aramco, Ahmed. I don’t know if any of you guys were at the, opening keynote speech, but he mentioned 600 failures account to 30. Catastrophic failures, which amounts to actually one fatality.

00:01:38:15 – 00:01:47:28
So, you know, he mentioned them three numbers that were really quite stark. When you look at CUI and corrosion as a whole.

00:01:48:00 – 00:01:55:08
Absolutely. And so obviously huge problem for, for our industries,

00:01:55:11 – 00:02:15:06
a lot of people looking at the causes publish lots of information. The folks at NACE or AMPP and their SP 0198 European Federation of Corrosion, their publication 55 and the AP 583 in the diagnosis is unanimous and that is water is the issue right?

00:02:15:06 – 00:02:43:18
You can do something. You can’t do anything about oxygen. You can’t do anything about metal. You have to look at the water. So in this talk we’re going to talk about water, how it behaves when it comes in contact with insulation in that dynamic. And so do it through a couple of real life, case studies and a real interesting one was the series events that happened up in the Alberta oil sands from, let’s say, 2015 to 2020.

00:02:43:24 – 00:03:12:03
And they were seeing loss of containment events caused by stress corrosion cracking and carbon steel piping, which is a bit unusual. And there was multiple incidents. It was all, pipelines built after 2000. They were uncoated carbon steel operating temperatures between 70 and 190 Celsius. They had mineral wool insulation with aluminum cladding. They had stress levels that weren’t normally associated with stress corrosion cracking.

00:03:12:03 – 00:03:36:27
And the cracks were in multiple directions, not just in the stress directions. And so a lot of research went into what was going on there. And so in three easy steps, what was happening was the mineral wool binder was degrading. It was producing low pH and corrosive ions. There was water ingress. They concentrated those ions onto the metal, surface.

00:03:36:29 – 00:04:06:20
And then the temperatures and the pipe pressures and design created the perfect storm for this stress corrosion cracking. So looking at a typical case of this loss of containment pipeline, we see, this was a case in, Cold Lake, Alberta in 2017, an emulsion line running at 150 C that was 35km, 14 years in service, and it had 2.5in of mineral insulation on it.

00:04:06:20 – 00:04:33:02
And the condition of the insulation when they stripped these sections of pipe as the insulation was wet, extensive CUI and there was loss of containment events. So 150 C the question is how can insulation be wet at 150 C and when you look at the typical temperature profile through a cross-section of mineral insulation, there really should be a line where the temperature crosses 100 C and above 100 C.

00:04:33:02 – 00:05:01:18
There shouldn’t be liquid water and below there can be liquid water that exists, but once liquid water absorbs into that insulation, what happens is you get a heat pipe effect where the liquid water is drawn into the dryer insulation, it vaporizes, vapor comes out and condenses again, and that becomes a heat pump that moves that boundary layer in, allowing that water to exist much closer to the process temperature.

00:05:01:21 – 00:05:21:29
And also it drives a significant increase in heat loss. And so when we look at a close up of that pipe, we can really see that happening. We have the binder burn out. We can see wet insulation at 6:00. And we can see the intact jacketing system. And that’s one of the observations that we heard quite a few times.

00:05:21:29 – 00:05:46:08
If you read through some of the documentation, is that the system, the jacketing and the insulation, it all looked intact, you know, pretty pristine. So that brings us to the question where is the water coming from? Where is all this water getting into the system coming from? Take a step back when we think about CUI predictions and outcomes.

00:05:46:08 – 00:06:10:08
Really it’s how wet does your steel get? How often and how long does it stay wet and all the water is coming from rain events, atmospheric water. And so when we want to think about a geographic regions corrosion under insulation risk, we look at how much rain that region gets and we look at how much relative humidity is in the region.

00:06:10:08 – 00:06:32:06
So that’s how often does it still get wet? How quickly can it dry out? And when we plot these we can see lower risk areas and geographies and higher risk. And you see I have two plotted points here. Emphasize ones. Cold Lake, Alberta that had all these issues with the stress corrosion cracking, the carbon steel. And the other is Abu Dhabi right here.

00:06:32:06 – 00:07:00:22
And we see they’re both in the relatively same risk, low risk category, but both are susceptible to CUI from atmospheric rain. Okay. Let’s look at another case about how water is interacting with insulation materials and and potentially causing issues. And this was a case where there was a customer that was operating a steam line and in Texas and they they had some underperforming insulation that they knew was wet.

00:07:00:23 – 00:07:23:09
And we came to them and said, well, let’s let’s do a trial where we over wrap the jackeing that was damaged with our Pyrogel insulation and we jacket it, and we’ll monitor that system and see if it improves the performance of the insulation. The insulation underneath dries out and improves. So we went down. We wrapped a ten meter section with our insulation.

00:07:23:13 – 00:08:04:03
And then we we instrumented also a ten meter control section. Started running the trial. And after four weeks sure enough this section we overlapped. It dried out. The heat loss decreased, performance increased. Successful trial. But then something strange happened. The control section that we didn’t treat started to improve as well. And so, you know, after a little bit of thought, you know, it’s clear what’s happening is there’s water migrating actually down these insulation systems and it’s causing degradation huge distances from where the water is getting in.

00:08:04:05 – 00:08:34:05
So this this migration can drive moisture through insulation for hundreds of meters. And more or less what happens? Pretty straightforward. You get a jacketing defect. Liquid water comes in the vapor phase diffuses towards drier areas where it then liquefies again, concentrates and continues moving, all the while bringing moisture which can cause corrosion under insulation, but also increasing heat loss as well.

00:08:34:07 – 00:09:05:23
So really a small damage to the jack and can poison long portions of your thermal insulation. So if that’s the case, you would expect if you went out to different systems and monitored them, you’d see some degradation in the thermal performance. And that’s just what we’ve done over the past 15 years. We’ve had the opportunity to go monitor specifically high pressure steam headers to see if the insulation is performing as it should.

00:09:05:25 – 00:09:41:05
And every time we do this, we see that the insulation is not. And sometimes the average is about it’s two times worse than the design, some much more. And again in these in these instances the systems look great. The jacketing looks intact, but they’re just not performing at design. So when you put all these things together, these combination of observations, you know, you just come to the conclusion that there is a high likelihood that your insulation system here locally contains water, even if it looks pristine.

00:09:41:08 – 00:10:07:12
So what can you do about it? Well, one thing is you can fix visible jacketing defects, it’s it’s, the energy savings alone will pay for it very quickly. You can use a Pyrogel over wrap to fix those. You gain some extra thermal resistance while you’re drying out your system. Or you can use Pyrogel which is, an aerogel based based blanket insulation in the first place.

00:10:07:14 – 00:10:34:05
It’s not susceptible to this this mechanism of, axial migration of water because it’s water resistant. It’s a little less vapor permeable than typical thermal insulation. It has a thinner cross-section, so there’s less area for water to migrate in your insulation. And it has no annular gap. And that annular gap almost acts like almost like a superhighway for water migration.

00:10:34:07 – 00:11:00:17
And so, you know, we’ve been at this now, supplying Pyrogel to the industry for 15 or 20 years hasn’t gone unnoticed by our competition. And so there’s lots of materials out in the market that kind of mimic these talking points over water resistant. We mitigate corrosion. So, you know, as a specifier, you’re left with the question, well, how can I really tell if insulation material is going to mitigate CUI.

00:11:00:19 – 00:11:24:09
You could look at some standardized lab tests. I mean I suppose things like the ASTM 79 five for stainless steel or the 871, which quantifies the corrosive ions in an insulation leachate, or the 1617, which gives us a number for carbon steel corrosion, or 1763, which just talks purely about how much water we can absorb in an insulation.

00:11:24:09 – 00:11:58:23
And these are great tests, and I wouldn’t specify an insulation that hasn’t evaluated these, but still, they’re just laboratory tests on material that’s pristine out of the box, not in service. And you can game these tests. So they’re important. Maybe you look at a system level evaluation like the AMPP 21442 method, the old NACE 516 where you take, an insulation and you wrap it on a pipe spool, you cycle the temperature, you wet it for three days, you let it dry for three days, and then you repeat.

00:11:58:25 – 00:12:19:26
When we do that with Pyrogel, it dries out in about three hours. When you do that with mineral wool, it never dries out. So you think about wet time of steel. But this is a better evaluation, I think, than just, a one time, analytical test. But still, it’s a very specific use case. So we’ll get back to the question.

00:12:19:26 – 00:12:43:20
How can I tell if an insulation material will mitigate side, I think real world performance over time. Do you have actual case studies that are last a long period of time showing, mitigation of corrosion under insulation in combination with those other things? Is is a good body of evidence to allow a specifier to feel comfortable with that question.

00:12:43:20 – 00:13:08:05
And so, you know, we’ve been supplying these, corrosion mitigating aerogel installations to the, to industry now for 15, 20 years or so. And, we have a great case study. We did a, MNB plant for Hu-Chems chemical in the Yeosu region of South Korea, which is a subtropical region. A lot of rainfall, high corrosion potential.

00:13:08:07 – 00:13:28:26
And we insulated a plant, in 2008. And then there was a phase 2 in 2012, and they allowed us to come back and survey the plant about a decade later. And we looked at a lot of different service classes. Some of them were, right in that sweet spot of corrosion under insulation temperature, that 50 to 175°C.

00:13:29:02 – 00:13:53:23
And some were, higher temperature service. And so when we looked at different service temperatures and I’m going to show you these first two cases, this ten inch pipe operating at 300 C, just to show you what the performance of the material. And we measured surface temperatures versus designed surface temperatures. And the material was performing at design.

00:13:53:23 – 00:14:22:11
So it’s performing like the day was put on ten years later. Same in this 72 inch doctrine and nitric acid facility that operated at about 136°C, performing exactly as it should as designed. So just from that alone, I just told you we looked at other materials in a study, a very extensive ballistic study that showed all of them had degraded every system we looked at, whereas the Pyrogel system is performing at design.

00:14:22:13 – 00:14:51:24
And it’s no surprise when we look at a system that’s operating at 90 C and inspect it for corrosion, there was none to be found a decade later. So really great body of real life data showing that the this Pyrogel insulation mitigates corrosion under insulation. I think this is, this was an 84 C pipeline insulated for ten years with Pyrogel, and they’ve cut it open.

00:14:51:24 – 00:14:57:26
It looks like the day they put it on. And that’s what a proven material looks like in the field.

00:14:57:29 – 00:15:28:01
Thank you. Mark. So, thanks, Mark, for that introduction. I’ve just got another 120 slides to go through here, so I know I’m stood between you guys and lunch, so, Yeah. I think ultimately, just to summarize some of the case studies, Mark’s just demonstrated, lab testing is important, but isn’t ultimately the ultimate test.

00:15:28:01 – 00:15:57:23
The ultimate test is in the field. And what’s important is for you to understand and recognize when you look at the insulation product, to look at products that have been field tested, that’s more important than any lab testing. So the ASTM 1720 standard, that is for aerogel blankets and, I think what exists in the market now is this false equivalence of if you meet ASTM 1728, you will meet the performance.

00:15:57:26 – 00:16:25:11
And and I think we want to dispel that myth. Basically that’s just lab testing. And it’s the in field performance that really demonstrates as customers you have a choice. And I want to just spend a little bit of time helping you understand why you should. When you consider an insulation product or a aerogel based insulation product, you should consider Aspen.

00:16:25:14 – 00:16:57:22
We have over 1.6 billion installed base around the world. Over 450,000,000ft² of our product have been installed around the world. We have the capacity to manufacture over 640 million, dollars worth of product in any year. We have 22 years of R&D. We are really the, instigators of that aerogel blanket. We have over 350 plus patents on our product, which is our original blanket product.

00:16:57:25 – 00:17:28:14
We have three out of four manufacturing facilities spread around the world. So we have, manufacturing in the Far East and also in the US. And 23 of the 24 world’s largest refineries are already using our products. I’d encourage you to come and visit our stand and learn a little bit more about our technology. We are getting lots of adoption here, around in the region.

00:17:28:14 – 00:18:01:19
Aramco, ADNOC, SABIC, all of these companies are using our products now. Business is growing rapidly in the region, and we think we have plenty of value to offer, our local customers. And just to summarize, basically, water is the enemy of installation from a corrosion perspective, from a performance perspective. And that’s really what our product does. Our product is in the business of prevention.

00:18:01:22 – 00:18:26:06
I’ve heard lots of talks today about, detection and so forth. But this is really what comes before detection is prevention. And that’s what our technology does. We have lots of case studies, to demonstrate our performance in the field. So when you use our product you can rest assured you’re using the product that’s already performed in the field.

00:18:26:12 – 00:18:39:07
And all the major operators are using it. And the last one here Pyrogel is really the only real world tested aerogel blanket with proven performance in the CUI space.

00:18:39:09 – 00:18:39:24
Thank you.