Predictive Maintenance with Advanced Thermal Imagers
Industries face challenges like equipment failures, overheating, energy inefficiencies, and safety risks. These problems lead to downtime, reduced productivity, and accidents. Moreover, for lots of processes optimization requires accurate temperature monitoring. Exosens provides advanced thermal imaging solutions that capture accurate heat anomalies, monitor machinery and electrical systems, support predictive maintenance and enable accurate process temperature monitoring thanks to powerful tools and devices built to meet industrial needs.
Importance of Thermal Imaging Sensors in Industrial Inspections
Compact thermal imaging sensors, which utilize SWIR and LWIR technologies, offer easy operation and have found extensive application in enhancing industrial safety process optimization and solving problems by effectively detecting variations in temperature. These sensors provide a user-friendly experience with a range of options for monitoring systems and capturing critical data for analysis.
Applications for Thermal Imaging Sensors
Functions of thermal imaging sensors across industries include:
- Electrical Overheating Detection: Identifies hot spots to prevent equipment failure and early fire hazards, ensuring continuous operation
- Mechanical Failure Monitoring: Focuses on tracking temperature increases in machinery to address issues like friction and wear, driving timely repairs
- Fire Prevention in Storage: Monitors sensitive materials to detect heat-triggered risks and prevent combustion
- EV Battery Storage hot spot detection: Real-time and constant monitoring of hot spots in storage spaces of EV batteries to avoid fire and pollution
- Water or Vapor Leak Detection: Highlights cold spots caused by water leaks, offering a targeted solution for building maintenance
- Gas Detection: Detects temperature anomalies associated with gas leaks, improving safety and reducing risks
- Process monitoring: Measures on real-time temperature absolute value as well as its variation and homogeneity on items during thermal treatment and temperature-critical steps
- Welding and additive manufacturing real time quality inspection: High speed, high temperature measurement of the welding spot to ensure high reliability of the operation and saves material
- Semiconductor wafers temperature and thermal discrepancies monitoring: Improves the process quality and overall yield of the production lines thus saving costs
Traditional inspections often miss early issues, making advanced thermal imaging tools essential. Thermal imaging cameras, equipped with advanced features, create detailed temperature maps that highlight hotspots. This proactive approach captures critical issues, reduces downtime, optimizes process performances, and improves efficiency by offering reliable measures to mitigate drifts and risks.
LWIR Cameras for Standard Thermal Imaging Applications
LWIR cameras are widely used in highly demanding applications such as process monitoring and industrial machine vision. Their ability to capture accurate and stable measurements with high resolution enables precise thermal inspection, large-surface analysis, and efficient data collection. By detecting temperature variations, LWIR cameras enable early identification of equipment anomalies, ensuring optimal process functionality and reducing downtime.
Exosens offers high-performance LWIR cameras (8 to 12 μm), designed for detecting thermal images with high accuracy. These cameras provide not only temperature measurements but also precise spatial information, making them indispensable for building and infrastructure inspections, water leak detection, gas detection, and process monitoring. With a larger field of view, they enable the inspection of extensive areas, increasing system throughput. Their compatibility with advanced software and industrial standards ensures easy content analysis, seamless operation, and integration into existing systems.
The Exosens cameras are designed for industrial and demanding applications. Their implementation doesn’t require any moving parts, making them maintenance-free and long like-time capable in 24/7 operations.
SWIR Cameras for High-Temperature Imaging
While LWIR cameras remain the industry standard for thermal imaging, specific high-temperature applications require complementary solutions such as SWIR cameras.
Unlike traditional thermal imaging cameras (LWIR), SWIR cameras do not capture the natural thermal emissions of objects at ambient temperature. However, they become highly effective for high-temperature monitoring above 400 °C, where materials start emitting significant infrared radiation in the SWIR range. SWIR imaging is therefore a complementary solution for specific high-temperature industrial processes.
SWIR cameras are ideal for high-temperature thermography applications, particularly for objects exceeding 400 °C. These cameras detect hotspots and are frequently used to inspect hollow glass bottle production lines, ensuring precise dimensions, detecting internal and external defects, and monitoring temperature uniformity. In metal processing, SWIR cameras excel in distinguishing between good and bad products by capturing changes in light intensity caused by material emissivity differences.
With powerful features and options, these cameras offer superior signal-to-noise ratios. Moreover, the SWIR waveband is less impacted by smoke and haze than visible light, enabling better observation of temperature mapping. They enable efficient monitoring from a distance, even on the edge of production lines, using long focal length lenses.
The other benefits of SWIR technology in thermal imaging applications are:
- Enabling very high-speed capture of short events. The global shutter nature and emitted light measurement provides the best-in-class thermographic capability of high-speed events above 400 °C.
- SWIR light passes through glass or plexiglass enabling protection of the camera and lens against projection or excessive heat.
Exosens provides a wide range of SWIR cameras for both two-dimensional (2D) and line-scan imaging. These cameras use Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs) detectors and excel in delivering high quantum efficiency in the 900 to 1700 nm wavelength range. Their advanced software tools, industrial-ready interfaces, and GenICam compliance make them easy to integrate, providing engineers and system integrators with a seamless operation experience.
Moreover, the Exosens SWIR cameras provide the highest available frame or line rates available in the market.
The Pro Edge in Thermal Imaging
With options for advanced features, compact designs, and powerful performance, Exosens thermal imaging solutions empower professionals to tackle problems ranging from equipment monitoring to building inspections. By capturing detailed data with infrared (IR) cameras, identifying water leaks, and detecting gas leaks, optimizing processes, these tools redefine industrial standards. Supported by cutting-edge software, industrial standards compliances and user-focused operation, Exosens ensures a seamless and effective experience in solving complex challenges.
About Photonis
Photonis is a leading product brand of Exosens, a high-tech company with more than 85 years of experience in the innovation, development, manufacture and sale of high-end electro-optical technologies. Photonis offers photo-detection and low-light-conditions imaging solutions for extremely demanding environments. Applications for the company’s products include Defense & Security, Nuclear Safety, Life Sciences & Environment, and Industrial Control & Non-Destructive Testing. The Photonis brand is internationally recognized as a major innovator in its fields with production and R&D sites in Europe and North America.
To request more information or a quotation for Photonis products, contact IL Photonics.