Thermography 2.0: The Next Hot Phase of Predictive Maintenance

Nearly every industrial facility has at least one infrared camera that was likely purchased with the promise of early fault detection and increased reliability. Thermography should be one of the most powerful predictive maintenance tools available. Newer camera technologies make it fast, non-invasive, and capable of identifying electrical and mechanical issues before they become failures.

It’s useful on just about every asset.

So why isn’t it utilized as it should be?

When a plant actually uses their IR Camera’s, they typically use one or both of the traditional approaches:

• Route based reports
• Ad-Hoc and un-documented use

Mature facilities or those with an established maintenance budget often perform route-based inspections. Technicians follow predefined paths, capture thermographic images, and compile reports detailing anomalies and recommended actions. These reports (usually created in external software) are then summarized and manually entered into the CMMS to generate work orders. For advanced sites, this can be done internally, but many organizations contract professionals to perform these inspections due to the skills and resources required to accurately determine faults.

Less mature sites, or those operating on a minimal budget use thermography in more of a reactive approach. Technicians pull out the camera for troubleshooting or spot checks, often correcting issues on the spot. While this approach is efficient, these inspections rarely get documented. This makes it difficult to determine a baseline and determine exceptions. Worst of all, this knowledge only resides with the employee performing the inspections.

These 2 approaches naturally evolved because they are massively different and each plant has different needs. Previously, there has not been a 1 size fits all solution. Thermography’s biggest barrier has never been technology, it’s been efficiency and effectiveness. The data path from camera, to analysis, to report, to the CMMS has too many manual steps. Every transfer of information introduces friction, delay, and potential for error and when something becomes that painful to maintain, it’s the first program to get deprioritized.

The good news is that industrial solutions are starting to appear which fix this problem. This is done by grounding the thermal inspections to the asset, defining the component images required, and automatically linking the images to the asset's components. All the inspections and images live in the cloud for a simplified analysis ready to synch with a CMMS. These solutions merge the traditional approaches resulting in the best of both worlds, efficient and documented thermographic inspections.

The future of thermography for all shapes and sizes of industrial facilities is hot.