Maintenance

USECASE MAINTENANCE

Maintenance is a tricky discipline, with high economical stakes: under-maintenance results in equipment failures, production interruptions and/or accident and can have catastrophic consequences; conversely, over-maintenance results in unnecessary equipment parts replacement, translating into operations disruption and overal cost increase; you often know a posteriori you were right or wrong to change parts… Should a breakage occur, increasing complexity of industrial systems makes spotting the defective mechanical or electrical component time costly, if not risky.

Thermal imaging relevantly helps industrials to address such challenges: LWIR cameras have become a popular tool, either for routine inspection or failure diagnosis, beside other advanced NDT non destructive testing technologies i.e. ultrasound, vibration, magnetic, Xray or even chemical analysis of process samples.
Overall, thermal cameras secure predictive maintenance, while limiting inspectors exposition to hazardous areas.