To Determine the Residual Lifetime of Electrical Joints and Contacts using Infrared Measurement

Elec­tri­cal equip­ment is age­ing — the pro­duced pow­er dis­si­pa­tion is con­stant­ly increas­ing. Nev­er­the­less, elec­tric switchgears should be oper­at­ed as inten­sive­ly and as long as pos­si­ble, since they are extreme­ly expensive.

As a con­se­quence, such instal­la­tions have to be inspect­ed reg­u­lar­ly. In order to ensure an unin­ter­rupt­ed pow­er sup­ply dur­ing diag­no­sis, infrared cam­eras are used. These allow to mea­sure the tem­per­a­tures with­out direct con­tact. The actu­al prob­lem, how­ev­er, is not the mea­sure­ment of the tem­per­a­tures itself, but the eval­u­a­tion of the mea­sured val­ues. All pre­vi­ous meth­ods exclu­sive­ly eval­u­ate the tem­per­a­ture of junc­tion with­out con­sid­er­ing the influ­ences of envi­ron­men­tal and load con­di­tions.  For this rea­son it is impos­si­ble to make a reli­able state­ment about the con­di­tion of the joints and contacts.

There­fore, THETA, the Insti­tute of High­volt­age and High­cur­rent at Dres­den Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, RIBE GmbH & Co. KG Elek­troar­ma­turen and Siemens AG I&S IS PGD 5 have joint­ly devel­oped a method which allows to deter­mine the resid­ual life­time of elec­tri­cal instal­la­tions out of their respec­tive tem­per­a­tures, ambi­ent con­di­tions and loads. There has been held an Euro­pean patent on this method. The reli­able infor­ma­tion that you can gain with the help of our infrared diag­no­sis puts you into the posi­tion to min­imise the risk of fail­ure of your elec­tri­cal instal­la­tions and to plan a state-ori­en­tat­ed maintenance.

Watch our video about Infrared Diag­no­sis to learn more about this topic!

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