Electric Motor Thermal Imagery
Electric Motor Thermal Imaging Inspection Scans
Thermal imaging is a very powerful maintenance tool with Electric Motors as it shows the effect of Electric Motor issues, overloading and/or overheating.
It can be used to prevent or predict failures and can be added to a Vibration Analysis route very easily.
Electric Motors can run hot for many reasons but catching downtime due to a bad bearing, bad winding, loose cooling fan or debris blocking vents or just general lack of cooling can be very valuable.
The general rule of thumb is “every 10 degrees Celsius cuts your lifetime in half”. So, to rationalize this, 20 degrees is half of the half (10year lifespan = 2.5 years). You can see very quickly reducing your lifespan below 1 year by simple overheating is not uncommon.
The attached thermal picture shows the effect of blocked cooling vents on a TEFC motor running at full load. This motor will not last long.
Ampro Electrics Thermal App is used for managing thermal images from the FLIR ONE™ camera. The app features a full hierarchical database for tracking points of interest over time. Create instant reports that include the thermal image, GPS location, non-thermal picture of asset, notes, and signature. Thermal images can be drawn over and annotated in reports to point out problem hot spots. Tap anywhere on captured images to determine temperature at a given spot.
