Insulation design material combination

The use of stainless steel in oil production has increased, and is of particular significance for production in deep waters. This applies both to production and process equipment carrying oil and gas and to seawater systems. For seawater systems the experience from nuclear power plants has been useful. In these plants, some high-alloy steels have performed well in equipments such as seawater pumps and heat exchangers. But the performance depends on service conditions, design and combination of materials. On the oil/gas side, good experience has been obtained with 13% Cr steel in production tubing, in components at the wellhead and in well valves. The same can be said about the use of other stainless steels in process systems offshore, but there have been some exceptions. For instance, SCC has occurred on duplex steel (22-5-3) under external heat insulation (compare Section 7.12) [10.11]. 

Already many lightweight membrane structures are in existence, and an increasing number of them are planned for the future, e.g. football stadium roofs. For such structures the combination of materials produces widely differing properties. Some projects are very cost-effective, while others are used for more expensive building constructions. Some constructions are of a temporary nature, some are erected at a fixed location some are required to be portable, while others may remain in place for decades. Textile roofs or walls may be open or closed according to the time of day or the position of the sun others stay fixed in one position. Some materials are required to have high translucency others may be designed for maximum insulation. 

In summary, our results have demonstrated that a colloidal monolayer can be used as a flexible template to create ordered nano-structured arrays. Combining it with other techniques, a series of ordered nano-structured arrays with centimeter size could be easily fabricated on many different substrates. These nano-structured arrays are of surface roughness on the nano- and micro-scales, or similar to the microstructure of lotus leaves. Our results have demonstrated that such micro/nano-structured arrays, not only of insulators and semiconductors but also of metals, display morphology-dependent wettability. Significant enhancement of both hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity can be achieved by fabricating special surface micro/nano-structure on any material. This means that we can also realize tunable and controllable wettability of surface of any material by designing the proper surface structure. From this study, it can thus be expected that the nano-devices based on our nano-structured arrays would be waterproof and self-cleaning, in addition to their special device functions. 

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