Fluke thermal imaging solutions featured in top industry magazines
With the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), monitoring assets remotely is becoming more commonplace for industrial applications. Two of Fluke Accelix and Fluke Corporation’s product specialists were recently featured in two leading industry publications, Efficient Plant and Processing magazines, discussing the company’s thermal imaging sensors and remote condition monitoring technology..
In an article by Efficient Plant, “What’s Up with Wireless Thermal Imaging?”, Frederic Baudart, lead product specialist with Fluke Accelix and Fluke Corporation, discussed the emergence of connected, semi-fixed, wireless technologies that has consequentially expanded thermal imaging capabilities.
According to the article by Jane Alexander, a managing editor at Efficient Plant, it’s crucial to leverage these thermal imaging capabilities to advance your reliability journey.
Thermal imaging can provide a wide range of benefits for a reliability program. For preventive and proactive maintenance, this technology can quickly make visible what might have been invisible problems within rotating- and other equipment systems. The areas of a plant where it can be leveraged are virtually endless, and the reasons for doing so are many, including:
- troubleshooting
- data collection
- mobility and flexibility
According to the article, “contact-free, wireless technology is safer for personnel and processes because it is noninvasive and requires no shutdowns or downtime to install.” Additionally, wireless sensor technology places some of the most difficult-to-reach equipment within range of a thermal imager, without the need for personnel to take the measurements in unsafe locations.
Additionally, Alex Desselle, product application specialist, wrote an article for Processing magazine on thermal monitoring with infrared sensors. In this article, Desselle explains how thermal imaging that uses semifixed, wireless infrared sensors allows end users to have a “proactive” rather than “reactive” response to potential breakdowns or problems that could lead to other failures in other equipment down the line.
Portable thermal imaging sensors can be installed on virtually any surface. They take sequential infrared images, thermal patterns of the surface temperature of equipment, and transmit those images to the cloud.
The fixed or semifixed mount Fluke 3550 FC Thermal Imaging Sensor, part of the Fluke Accelix platform, was also featured as a Processing Breakthrough Product of the Year. This technology boasts user-defined monitoring cycles (1-, 5-,10-, 15-, 30- and 60-minute), which are shorter than typical route-based thermal inspection intervals. Issues are identified as they develop, and maintenance and reliability professionals can assess how quickly they need to take action and make better maintenance planning decisions.
Read our article, “Making predictive maintenance more predictable with thermal monitoring,” to learn more about remote condition monitoring with infrared sensors.
