In addition, with the development of ocean transportation and offshore oil fields, the supporting offshore drilling platforms, oil carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) ships, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) ships have developed rapidly. These special ships put forward new requirements for thermal insulation and fire separation. The temperature involved in low-temperature and ultra-low temperature pipelines is mostly -40 to -170 degrees Celsius. In the construction of LNG/LPG projects and other low-temperature projects, the most commonly used cryogenic insulation materials are perlite, PUR/PIR (polyurethane rigid foam), Foamed glass, rubber and plastic, modified phenolic foam, etc. There are many problems in the use of these traditional materials, such as rapid performance decay, high maintenance cost, poor thermal insulation effect, and large cooling loss, which are easy to bring danger to the storage and transportation of natural gas or other compressed gases; There are many inconveniences in the layout design; the pipeline is corroded by water because of its poor waterproofness, and the waterproof effect is good but cannot meet the fire protection requirements. The aerogel material has excellent thermal insulation and cold insulation effect. At ultra-low temperature, the thermal conductivity is ≤0.02W/(m·K), which effectively reduces the cooling loss, and the required thickness of the insulation layer is greatly reduced, providing an optimized solution for the design of intensive pipeline layout. Excellent waterproof performance at low temperature, inhibits the penetration of water into the surface of metal pipelines, prevents pipeline corrosion and reduces the thermal insulation effect caused by water seepage. The superposition of many advantages has brought qualitative changes to the existing cryogenic cooling system.
