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Show SCIENCE in our LIVES Infrared Thermography: Conserves Enerqy Is your home adequately insulated? A new kind of , camera could help you tell. In one experiment, a three-story building was insulated in-sulated with foam between the outside brick wall and the inner concrete wall. An identical building was not insulated. Then the two buildings were "photographed" with a special heat-sensitive camera utilizing the process known as infrared thermography. thermo-graphy. Result: infrared photographs clearly showed that the insulated building had a cooler outside wall temperature than the uninsulated un-insulated building and that temperature distribution was more uniform. What this experiment by the Gulf Science and Technology Tech-nology Co. (GS&T) demonstrated demon-strated was that the insulation insula-tion was effective and had been applied uniformly within the walls. Also, the analysis confirmed that conservation con-servation of heat would pay for the cost of the insulation insula-tion in a relatively short time. One way that the heat-sensitive heat-sensitive camera utilized by GS&T is saving energy is by detecting heat loss. It has also been used to determine the operating efficiency of process heaters and to forecast fore-cast equipment maintenance problems at refineries and chemical plants. Another application for thermography techniques is predicting electrical failures in switches, motor starters and high energy substations. This could prevent power failures that have immobilized immobil-ized major American cities in years past. |