The Application Of Infrared Imaging Technology In Radiator Fault Detetion

As a bottom appliance of heating system, heating-radiator transfers the heat carried by heat-medium in heating system to the air in order to compensate heat loss in a room. Because of bad operation or management, different quality of water, high working pressure and physical or chemical faults in materials of heating system, there are various faults in the running of heating-radiator, for example corrosion fault. These faults have severely impacted on the heating-radiator system operation and safety. Now most heating-radiator faults are detected by empirical judgment and the research on heating-radiator fault prediction is lagged behind, it is desired to develop a methodology to predict the faults before it breaks out.This paper takes the heating-radiator as research objects, and the infrared imaging technology is applied in detecting heating-radiator faults. To identify heating-radiator faults better, the fault modes of heating-radiator are approximately divided into three types- quality fault, corrosion fault, and running fault. On the heat conduction and the infrared temperature-measuring principle, the feasibility of the heating-radiator fault detection by the infrared thermal imager is conformed by the heating model of heating-radiator establishing. With the experiment apparatus in the closed lab, a lot of the infrared thermographs of heating-radiator are taken and the typical photos of them are chosen so as to abstract the infrared imaging characteristics of the surface temperature of the normality and abnormality heating-radiator by employmg the infrared imaging characteristic, horizontal or vertical discriminance. The abnormal thermal information is captured by the infrared thermal imager by that of normality and recorded in the infrared thermograph By analysis of the infrared imaging characteristics, the location, shape and size of the defect can be obtained combining heating-radiator's structure, technics and running conditions. The various factors influencing the detecting results by the infrared thermal imager are analyzed and some of them are passed over according to the environment of this experiment.Because the errors are brought lab environment, emissivity of heating-radiator and so on, the BP neural network as verification technology is introduces to build a model which is expected to verify experimental data and results.