Thermal imaging (infrared imaging) is an excellent predictive maintenance technique to accurately identify electrical and some mechanical faults and supports other techniques including vibration analysis, oil analysis and ultrasound.
A key advantage of thermal imaging is the speed of detection of faults; enabling focused in-depth analysis using other techniques only where required. For example fast sweep of conveyors for a rapid identification of equipment that is running hotter than neighbouring machines, saving a significant amount of monitoring time.
Equally for electrical equipment; checking banks of fuses with a spot pyrometer is very time-consuming. A thermal imaging camera will take just a few minutes to identify loose connections and power imbalance issues.
And for refractory linings, thermal imaging cameras are the only practical condition-monitoring tool available today.