Selecting Thermal Pipe Insulation via Discrete Optimization

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Industrial pipe insulation is almost always selected from discrete catalog steps of material, thickness, and jacket/cladding, yet a large share of the literature optimizes a continuous thickness. This paper develops a directly implementable, catalog-based method that outputs the globally optimal insulation choice for each operating temperature and summarizes it as temperature bands with explicit transition points. The approach combines a physically transparent heat-loss model with a simple, robust optimization over the finite decision set.

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August 2026

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