The 3-Zone Pipe is part of Simscape Fluids, and the 2-Zone Pipe is part of the Simscape foundation library. The way to think about this is that the 3-Zone Pipe is a specialized component designed for a specific purpose, and the 2-Zone Pipe is designed for all other purposes.
The purpose of the 3-Zone Pipe can be summarized by the following sentence found in the Description section of the 3-Zone Pipe's documentation page:
"Use this block to efficiently capture, without resorting to chains of Pipe (2P) blocks, the dynamics of phase change along a pipe."
Unless you need the specific features designed for capturing the dynamics of phase change along a pipe, you do not need the 3-Zone Pipe. For example, do you need to know the length fractions of the liquid, vapor, and mixed-phase zones in the pipe? This can be observed via the output port Z of the 3-Zone Pipe. In contrast, the 2-Zone Pipe does not offer this information.
For more information, you can explore the following Simscape examples.
Example using the 2-Zone Pipe:
Example using the 3-Zone Pipe:
Run the following command to get the example documentation in MATLAB R2018b.
web(fullfile(docroot, 'physmod/hydro/examples/pipe-fluid-vaporization-and-condensation.html'))
Please follow the below link to search for the required information regarding the current release:
