The problem
Thermal problems in a plant announce themselves late. A motor winding degrading, a loose electrical connection, a bearing running dry and an overloaded cable all produce heat well before they produce failure — and the standard instrumentation for noticing is a thermal camera on an annual survey, or somebody putting a hand near something.
Ambient temperature sensing does not solve this. By the time a hot component has raised the temperature of the whole room, the component has been in trouble for a long time and the room is now also part of the problem.
Which channels see it
Detection here is not one sensor reporting a number. It is several channels read at the same instant, where what one channel does NOT do is often as informative as what another does.
- Surface temperature — A contact probe on the equipment. The primary channel, and the early one.
- Ambient temperature — The reference against which surface temperature is judged. Divergence is the diagnosis.
- Vibration — Mechanical causes — bearing, imbalance — show here as well as thermally.
- Sound level — Changes in mechanical noise, and fans that have stopped cooling something.
- Combustible gas — Rises when heat begins to break material down — the transition from hot to smouldering.
How it is detected
The system tracks surface temperature and ambient temperature as two separate channels and pays attention to the relationship between them. Both rising together is the weather or the process. Surface rising while ambient stays flat is a specific object getting hot, and that is the case worth an alert.
Thermal runaway — the battery and energy-storage case — has its own signature: surface temperature climbing while ambient lags, electrolyte vapour appearing on the gas channels, and audible venting on the acoustic channel. Three independent channels agreeing, in a precursor window measured in minutes.
Prediction runs on the surface channel like any other: current value plus slope gives a time-to-threshold, which is what makes it possible to schedule an intervention rather than react to an alarm.
What an operator gets
The output is meant to be actionable by somebody on shift, not interpreted by an engineer afterwards.
- Continuous surface temperature on the equipment that matters, rather than an annual thermal survey.
- An alert on divergence from ambient, which is the measurement that actually means something.
- Correlated vibration and acoustic context, which usually distinguishes a mechanical cause from an electrical one.
- A time-to-threshold estimate on the thermal trend.
