Keysight Technologies TrueIR series Thermal Imager

Keysight Technologies

U5850 series TrueIR Thermal Imagers

Confidently detect problems with four times better resolution

Why use thermography?

Every object that is above absolute zero temperature emits infrared radiation. This phenomenon enables us to use thermography, which detects the infrared radiation from an object and produces the image of the radiation which is called a thermogram, IR image or thermal image. A thermal image effectively tells the surface temperature of an object, depending on the amount of radiation that was received. Over the years, thermography has evolved from being used as merely a tool for surveillance and military to a wide variety of applications, such as predictive maintenance to monitor the health and condition of an object, home or building inspections, medical, equipment and many more. Here are some of the common application settings:

Predictive maintenance on electrical and mechanical systems

In predictive maintenance environments, thermal imager is used to perform mechanical and electrical inspections on motos, pumps, switch gears, circuit breakers, and the like. Hotspots as shown in the infrared (IR) images above indicate there may be a loose connection or a specific component is about to breakdown. These indications are warning signs which help to eliminate potential problem.

Commercial or residential building inspections

With the continued urbanization which drives constructions of commercial and residential buildings, it creates a demand for building inspections and maintenance. The U5850 series TrueIR thermal imagers come in handy to perform both interior or exterior structural building inspections such as air infiltration, condition of floor heating elements, moisture on ceiling tiles, as well as uneven roof surfaces. This is essential to assure compliance with the plans, check on workmanship and code compliance.

Electronics design and troubleshooting

One of the fastest ways to troubleshoot design and manufacturing quality issues on circuit board is through physical inspection. Traditionally, this is done by touching the surface of the circuit board to check for hotspots. However, this technique could be dangerous when used on high voltage circuits without proper safety precautions. This is where the thermal imagers come in handy. With the ability to measure temperature distribution over the whole circuit board, R&D and process engineers now can quickly inspect the circuit board to find thermal anomalies without having to touch it - non-contact temperature measurement.

In the field of electronics design, test engineers utilize the thermal imager to perform temperature characterization on electronics circuit designs, devices, systems and power electronic modules.

Other applications

In fact, thermography can be used for many other applications such as automotive, medical, equine, metal processing, chemical processing or even renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic systems.

Fine resolution

Fine resolution is a technology that restores the details originally inherent to the object while enhancing the resolution, at the same time minimizing fuzziness and noise. It is accomplished by performing sophisticated calculations on continuous multi-frames of the image itself. The goal is to evaluate for misalignment caused mainly by hand tremor or shaking of the hands. Next, the firmware detects and corrects the information between images through one feature pixel resulting in clearer and sharper (IR) thermal images.

How fine resolution works

The figure below is a simplified model of the fine resolution process. Each step of the processes is designed to handle different tasks. Multi-frame acquisition provides the images or data for processing at the next level. Super-positioning analyzes and merges all of the data together to prepare for reconstruction, where final touches are made to ensure a clear and sharp image is produced – resulting a thermal image with four times more effective resolution.