Infrared Industrial Automation

Industrial process monitoring with thermal cameras will help eliminate unplanned outages due to overheating in electrical systems, gear boxes, motors and other rotating equipment.

In general, electrical and mechanical connections will heat up before they fail. With electrical connections, a load on the circuit combined with a poor connection will cause arcing, creating a hot spot. Mechanical components such as bearings will heat up with increased friction, or misalignment. While undetectable to the naked eye, these issues are clearly visible with thermal imaging.

Viper Imaging’s Critical Asset Monitoring system utilizes FLIR thermal imaging cameras to monitor for temperature increases. The system will alarm, notifying plant engineering teams of a problem before it shuts down the line or a machine.

Multiple FLIR thermal imaging cameras, which can be housed in industrial enclosures, are installed in fixed positions where they have a clear field of view (FOV) of the equipment. The cameras process thermal images of the asset measuring the surface temperature. Specific regions of interest (ROI) are predefined for analysis – measuring external temperature and alarming on anomalies. Defining ROIs also allows our software to ignore objects around the equipment which results in a reduced number of unwanted alarms. The thermal images and temperature data are stored for process analysis and quality control, providing engineers the data they need to make critical decisions about the efficiency and repair of their critical assets.

The FLIR cameras are integrated with ViperVision software to directly communicate with most industrial platform controllers. This can be implemented to monitor just one piece of equipment or several. ViperVision software is capable of monitoring multiple assets simultaneously. The software analyzes and compares the data against the asset’s predefined parameters, and it will trigger an alarm if warranted. Data is transmitted wirelessly to the customer’s control room, and alerts can be sent via email. Parameters can be adjusted based on the specific application needs.