Thermal Imaging in Critical Asset Health Monitoring: The Details That Deliver Advantage

Vision in manufacturing often revolves around the big picture: more production, greater efficiency, and steady growth. However, while big-picture goals define a company’s direction, true success lies in precision on the smallest scale. Details that are seemingly minute and often overlooked can make the difference between uninterrupted operation and costly downtime.

There are hundreds and even thousands of components across a facility—from cable connectors to large-scale electric motors—keeping your workers safe, keeping your production lines moving, and keeping you competitive. Subtle vibrations, slight shifts in temperature, or an unusual data pattern can all signal much larger issues waiting to unfold. These “small” details, if left unchecked or unobserved, can be the catalysts for systemic failures with catastrophic consequences.

It’s the vision of thermal imaging.

Thermal Imaging: Bringing details to life

With thermal imaging, companies can transform their reactive condition and process monitoring programs into proactive, predictive activities that ensure equipment repairs and replacements happen on a schedule instead of after a failure. Predictive maintenance is built on a foundation of routine, repeated critical asset monitoring that identifies equipment with high impact potential and builds a historical dataset of normal operating temperatures. This data is key to spotting changes in asset health and predicting the optimal time to take the equipment offline for repair.

For example, the utility grid may wish to know what temperature a cable connection is under a particular electrical loading, to understand resistance and the likelihood of failure. Or, a production plant may need detailed data on how hot an electric motor is when running at a known resistance in order to trust whether the motor will continue running flawlessly or fail.

FLIR has long been a pioneer in the predictive maintenance space, specialising in the design and production of advanced thermal imaging cameras, components, and sensors. We continually invest in research and development and test real-world applications to ensure you’re able to capture the details that really matter.

Integrity of Image

Good, useful thermal images need to be detailed, vibrant, and crisply focused. Our image processing technologies enhance thermal images— reducing noise and improving contrast— to provide you with clearest, sharpest visuals. Key to this technology is FLIR’s proprietary Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging (MSX®) process, which overlays visible light details onto thermal images in real-time and provides users with a more complete understanding of the thermal scene.

FLIR UltraMax® is another important image enhancement technology, in that it provides a final image with four times the data. UltraMax captures a rapid burst of thermal images in their original resolution and then compiles them within FLIR software into a single, higher definition image. This added detail, paired with up to four times more pixels covering the target area, does more than provide brilliant imagery; each pixel in a FLIR thermal image provides a temperature reading. By enhancing the image through UltraMax, users can also improve temperature measurement accuracy.

Data you can depend on: precision at pixel level

Think of it this way: a thermal camera measures temperature with each pixel, so having more pixels on your target ensures a more accurate reading. This ability is crucial when small temperature variations can indicate potential issues.

Say you’re inspecting a motor that typically has one section that runs hotter than the rest of the machine. If only one pixel is covering the hottest spot while the pixels around it cover cooler areas, you may not get the most accurate reading on the motor temperature. Having multiple pixels—and thus, multiple temperature readings—on that same critical hot spot will provide the most detailed heat analysis of subtle temperatures differences across an object or area. Your thermal images will therefore provide more than qualitative visuals: they’ll provide quantitative insights.

Change, Comparison, and Chronology

Advanced thermography equips maintenance teams with a systematic approach to asset monitoring, enabling the identification of subtle issues that traditional methods might miss. By focusing on the three Cs—Change, Comparison, and Chronology—businesses can unlock the big picture vision of asset health: minimising unexpected downtime, extending the lifespan of machinery, optimising overall operational efficiency, and keeping employees safe.

• Change: Even minor temperature shifts can indicate early wear, stress, or failure, so it’s important to not only detect change at a moment in time but to also build a picture of how changes unfold over time.

• Comparison: Inspectors should benchmark equipment across the same models with the same operating conditions and load. For example, they can compare the performance of 120 motors across a single production line to rapidly identify outliers and potential failures.

• Chronology: The ability to create a data timeline is critical to understanding temperature patterns over time and allow teams to predict future issues based on trends. Regular data capture (e.g., every three, six, or 12 months) builds this historical context, transforming snapshots into a meaningful diagnostic timeline.

Consistency, Control and Confidence

Success in manufacturing depends on a big-picture vision built on detailed, real-time, information-rich insights.

Thermal imaging-based condition monitoring is driving real strategic advantage at both the macro and the micro level, turning the 3C’s of Change, Comparison and Chronology into Consistency, Control and Confidence. This approach protects and enhances proactive production and overall asset health through system reliability, operational efficiency, and predictive maintenance planning and gives you the vision to see beyond the visible.