Monitoring of Thermal Dispersion in Indoor Environments: an InfraRed Scanner Technique

Estimating the Heat Energy Loss is a key issue to understand energy efficiency in buildings. However, it can be difficult to locate where heat losses occur in a large building. Infrared Thermography Technique can be used to have a global view of the thermal conditions of the indoor environments. It is a non-invasive remote temperature measurement technique, which uses the emissions of bodies in the infrared region to obtain information on their temperature. The thermal camera is the instrument that is used to carry out measurements of this type, and has the task of acquiring thermal images by detecting the infrared emission of the bodies that fall within its field of view. This technique is used nowadays for many applications such as biomedical, automotive and also construction and thermoidraulic. In particular, in these latter, IR thermography is used for monitoring of static structures, which typically not require high performances of the thermal cameras in terms of time-response and accuracy of the measurement. Anyhow, depending on the specific application it could be necessary to monitor large areas at a short distance, so the devices used need to have wide acquisition angles and higher resolutions. However, using a high-performance device for these kind of applications is not convenient because of the high cost, which depends both on the dimension of FPA (Focal Plane Array) matrix and on the optical system used and also on the Utility Software for specific elaborations. Even though the prices are lower than in the past, if you have to use the thermal camera in applications which need different resolutions or optical requirements, the use of a flexible and configurable system is a good choice to maximize the investment. In this paper the authors propose a measurement technique based on a low cost infrared scanner for monitoring thermal dispersion in indoor environments. This technique realizes on a thermal imaging scanning system consisting of a single thermopile sensor. The sensor mounted on a PAN and TILT scanning system has the function of simulating the behavior of an FPA (Focal Plane Array) matrix, whose resolution is determined by the scanning range and angle, both selectable by the user.