Monitoring energized electric motors is becoming a common practice as part of reliability programs. Power quality and motor performance can be assessed in a matter of a few seconds of data acquisition. The most important parameter for assessing power quality and motor operation is by far analysis of voltage. If voltage is problematic all other data will reflect that.
Figure 1. Peak and RMS Voltage Time Domains
At first blush, inspecting buildings with thermography might appear to be a rather straightforward endeavor. While this is partially true, there are some points to consider. Heat transfer in buildings can be dynamic and understanding the thermal conditions and how they change during the inspection process is essential to interpreting the data collected.
With the advent of inexpensive storage in the past few years, many cameras use external memory cards to record images, video, and in some cases, text or voice annotation. For the most part, this is a good thing. However, there can be a downside. Because memory cards are inexpensive, users may tend to be more careless with them than in the past. And it’s one more (tiny) thing to keep track of. As a thermographer, the images captured and stored during your inspections are critical to your job, so it pays to take care of your memory.
My journeys this month have taken me up and down the West Coast performing thermography on electrical systems plus an emergency run to a manufacturing facility.
It was 30 years ago that my 20-year career in the US Naval Submarine Service led me to a job in Tampa, Florida. Little did I know that I was on a career path in an emerging technology. A path that would outrage some in the electric motor manufacturing and repair industries. A path for a technology that would provide significant maintenance capabilities for any commercial facility that had critical electric motors. It was both an exciting and intimidating time.
Using IR to verify construction details of commercial facilities is another use of the technology. With the right conditions, thermography can be successfully used to verify placement of reinforcement grout in concrete masonry unit (CMU) walls.
Just because your camera has a very high or very low temperature range capabilities does not mean your camera will operate in those conditions. We must distinguish between the camera’s temperature range capabilities and its operating environment temperature capabilities. The cameras’ range is defined as: “the preset range of temperatures that can be viewed and/or measured”. Some cameras have a single preset range of temperatures and others have two or more presets that must be appropriately selected by the operator.
The Snell Group kicked off the year with a long-time customer in Camden, NJ. Our customer has a shutdown every January for 2 weeks. As with any company, shutdowns are critical to their operations to get things fixed and ready for the next production cycle. It takes months of preparation from many different vendors and operations within the company. Shutdowns can create chaos but if planned right, organized chaos. For The Snell Group we make it easy for our customers by staying in constant contact up to and throughout our time onsite.
One of the benefits of holding an onsite thermography course is that we can customize the hands-on sessions so that facility can practice the newly acquired knowledge in field conditions. During these exercises, I have often seen a typical, yet potentially devastating, novice thermographer mistake. Pointing to make a point.