Self-adjustment methodology of a thermal camera for detecting faults in industrial machinery

Industrial machinery makes extensive use of induction motors as primary motion supplies for the associated kinematic chain. These motors and the kinematic chain are susceptible to failures in one or several of the components making the detection of the faults a major issue for industries. Thermography is a technique that has been used for monitoring and diagnosis in industrial facilities and it is suitable for the monitoring of induction motors and the associated kinematic chain. This technique is an aid for the detection of faults and the diagnosis of the operating condition of industrial machinery. Several research works have used thermography for this purpose, but the problem is the manual adjustment that needs to be done to the thermal camera in order to obtain thermal images, named thermograms, that give the true temperature readings of the objects in focus. This paper presents a novel methodology that makes the adjustment of the thermal camera in an automated way, using additional external temperature sensors to calibrate the thermal images provided by the low-cost thermal camera to give readings of the true temperature of the objects. Experimentation is performed on an induction motor with an associated kinematic chain to test the efficiency of the proposed methodology.