Monitoring of a rotary kiln with thermography
APArDT:
Automtically Logging of Alerts for Rotary Kilns with Thermography
Task
The non-stop operation of rotary kilns in the chemical production process grounded stress-related problems. Temperatur control is an importent parameter in the monitoring of chemical processing systems and plant control.
The demand in this project was to constitute an application for monitoring a process furnaces via image processing. Different customer defiened areas of the furnaces were meant to be observed continuously.
Furthermore a temperature limit break had to activate an alert. The soiling in the industrial environment and a distance of 200m between camera and PC were challenging conditions to the solution.
camera protective housing
Software for monitoring a rotary kiln and definition of the ROIs for temperature monitoringSolution
The system consists of an analogue thermographic camera by Flir Systems GmbH and an industrial PC with a National Instruments frame grabber card. PC and camera are linked via fibre optics with a serial port. A special body protects the Flir camera against soiling. The temperature of predifined ROIs (Region of Interest) are contact-less captured.
Three main features for temperature logging in the rotary kiln are realised with the S.E.A. LabVIEW based software. Exceeding of temperature limit sets off the alarm.
The permanent graphical plot of various temperature trends enables a forecasting of temperature excess and process controling. The history function displays the last 100 image files saved as regular to achieve a significant conclusion of malfunctions.