Why Buying an Infrared Camera Can Be a Bad Idea

Over the past few decades, thermographic analytics of operating equipment has saved millions of dollars to both the public and private sectors. Condition based maintenance is the idea that if we can analyze the condition of equipment and then intercept a deteriorating condition leaving healthy equipment to do the job it is meant to do, we have saved money on both sides of the equation.

How can I say that? Because just isolating the ships I have inspected for the US Navy since the early 1980's saved the Navy millions of dollars, prevented fires, improved environments for workers, reduced fuel costs, and saved lives at sea. Thermographers I have known working for System Energy Audit Corp, Autek Systems Corp, Technology Managers, Asset Investment Management, and now Marine System Inspection LLC, have done this also. So I can claim that from personal knowledge, I am an expert in this field.

Why then is buying an infrared camera without training a bad idea?

You are thinking as a manager or maintenance professional, perhaps as a Chief Engineer that you need to save your company millions of dollars on maintenance by incorporating thermography into your toolbox.

Great idea, but this is followed by and error thinking this can be done without a qualified thermographer. Thermography is not a do it yourself analysis. Forgive me, but this is like buying a pipe wrench when you need a plumber.

I was shocked last year when a camera salesman told me the cameras were point and shoot devices and told me, "you can ignore the emissivity settings on the camera and just point and shoot." He was talking about qualitative analysis as opposed to quantitative analysis, but this was still a major mistake.

The purpose for these capabilities is to help in proper analysis, and they are very important aspects of the imaging device.

Having been a certified thermographer for more than 28 years and watching the equipment being used by thermographers evolve from seventy pound beasts mounted on a chest harness we used in 1985 on the USS Kitty Hawk, Constellation, and Ranger to smaller lighter units I used on the Nimitz, the SBX, and modern Supertankers, to the newest lightweight radiometer designs today, I have seen it all. But this, a salesman telling people a highly designed and technical camera could be used like a $50 digital camera was misguided.

I am afraid the look on my face told it all because he immediately started to justify his position. We were talking to another scientist who was trying to determine which emissivity setting to use for the printed circuit board he was testing but has thermal issues. Fortunately the other scientist had the same response as I did. I was on faculty at SDSU at the time and part of my job was to help people through technical issues as they brought products to market. I was the Principal Investigator, or chief scientist for a series of project at San Diego State University College of Sciences when in 2005 I was using a thermographic imaging radiometer, what you would refer to as an IR camera, to examine heat flows inside of a stainless steel geothermal desalination device when I saw a life size full image of myself looking back at me.

While this is interesting, there is a specific point to this.

Just think for a moment about the material I was imaging, the heat of the device, 99C and filled with steam, and there I am at a mere 37C but looking as bright as a light bulb on its surface, but why?

So you buy one of these cameras and stand in front of a reflective surface and find your first problem. You run this through the free software that came with the camera and found a real issue saving your company money. Your engineers come in and shut down the plant for an hour while this cools off, you clean the contacts, check for other damage, and put this back together, power back up and you have saved the company money, right?

Wrong, you have just shut down your plant for no reason at all; I wouldn't expect you to know you were looking at a reflection as you are not a thermographer. The cost of this error is found in lost production time, and the labor costs wasted.

The next time your plumbing leaks, don't go to the hardware store to buy a pipe wrench, call the plumber. Here, you needed a thermographer, not a thermal imaging radiometer, sometimes called an IR Camera.

An experienced thermographer, not just a trained thermographer will see this issue and many others immediately and recognize the reflection and the ones you don't see such as the warm wall behind you, or the effect on the image of the cold sky, or worse, the cold breeze. The surface condition of the material being examined has emissivity (which tells you how much of the thermal energy that conducts to the surface will emit as radiated energy), reflectivity (which tells you how much of the energy striking its surface reflects off), and absorptivity (how much of the energy that strikes the surface is absorbed into the material).

The difference between doing it yourself and hiring a qualified thermographer can mean millions of dollars in maintenance costs because the converse problem of not understanding and using those engineering adjustments would be not detecting an issue where the overheating is real but the emissivity too low and the untrained person using the camera simply doesn't see the problem.

Now that you know about reflections, you can simply inform your maintenance guy to move out of the reflection. But when you move out of the reflection, something else is being reflected. Remember the reflection is not caused by your body; your body heat was simply what was in the reflection at that time. The reflection is caused by the surface condition which didn't change even if the picture of it did because you moved out of the reflection. Think about your bathroom mirror, does it stop reflecting when you move to the side? Of course not, both reflective surfaces reflect something else when you move to the side.

Land facilities and ships are of course, different ages and have different equipment in each. Assume for a moment you have a new facility, and specifically one where your top rate engineers installed IR windows for inspection purposes to help prevent loss of personnel by arch flash.

How does this affect an infrared image? Objects that transmit light through them are sometimes called grey bodies. Kirchhoff described what a black body would act like, but these are theoretical, a grey body passes some of the radiation through it, but never all of the energy.

This means some of the energy travels through and radiates from it and that depends on the material the window is made of, its temperature and then the frequencies of light passing through. Suffice to say that the objects viewed through these windows appear hotter than they are; this is true of BaF2 and CaF2 windows, not necessarily of acrylic special compounds. To detail that means discussing how infrared radiometers work, the infrared range each works in, Wien's law, Planck curves, and the Maxwell-Stefan equations.

So here is your dilemma: You know a trained and experienced thermographer can save your facility or ship millions of dollars in maintenance costs and down time, prevent fires and lengthen the life of your equipment, but why pay a thermographer when the salesman told you his camera was "point and shoot," why not just buy the camera?

The answer comes from industry where in-house inspections by untrained maintenance personnel have only slightly better maintenance records, verses those who save millions of dollars by hiring experienced thermographers.

I have been on many ships that had infrared cameras and exactly one, a supertanker where the chief engineer was a thermographer himself, trained the crew correctly in its use and had no need for the thermography service.

The question becomes one of expense justification and company profits. Do you want to save $10,000 on inspections by buying your own camera, or save millions of dollars by hiring a professional?

Please allow a small simile: When there is a leak in the wall are you going to buy a pipe wrench, or call the plumber?

Save your money, don't buy a camera when you need a thermographer.

Comments? Questions? Email Here

© HowtoAdvice.com

How to Advice .com