New Online Course - WEB-SW35 - Creating a Field Assignment using FLIR Tools

One of the requirements for obtaining an ITC certification after completing an ITC course is demonstrating your ability to operate, diagnose, and produce a report using your infrared camera and software.
This short course describes a step by step procedure for producing a basic field assignment using the standard FLIR Tools software suite. This course is FREE for all students.
Link to the Course Home Page

A Level III Class Gets Schooled…by the Banquet Staff

Ronald D. Lucier, ASNT NDT Level III

Last month I was conducting a Level III class at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. If you aren’t familiar with the facility it is a wonderful place to conduct meetings. The staff is great, food is overwhelming and the rooms are inexpensive and clean. Plus the hotel has many restaurants, a movie theater, a bowling alley and of course a casino. It has been an ITC favorite for over 10 years.

Lately, though, we have been having issues with the meeting room, specifically the temperature.  The past couple times I’ve taught there it has been very cold and students have complained.  Now, I like my hotel room cold enough to hang meat, but 63˚F (17.2˚C) is a bit extreme for conducting a meeting unless you are in Antarctica, which we were not. 

Once again, we were having the same issues…

Throwback Thursday – AGA Thermovision 651

While at FLIR Systems in Täby, Sweden last week for the ITC User Conference, I came across this on display in the main lobby that I just had to share as a “Throwback Thursday” item.  It’s an AGA Thermovision 651, the world’s first commercial infrared system from the mid-1960s.

The device used liquid nitrogen to cool the detector and worked with a display that was a modified oscilloscope. The camera had a field of view of 5˚ x 5˚, a thermal sensitivity of 0.2˚C (0.36˚F) and a frame rate of 16 Hz.  Total weight, including all necessary accessories (tripod, oscilloscope, etc.) exceeded 110lbs (50kg)!

Thermal imagers certainly have come a long way since then, but having the chance to see this in person really makes me appreciate what we have for options in the marketplace today.

2200 m/s Neutron - How I Got Into Infrared Thermography

ITC Senior Instructor Ron Lucier is back with another blog, this time reflecting on how he got started in infrared thermography.  Like many of us in the industry, he unexpectedly caught the “IR bug” while doing something completely different:

What do thermal neutrons and infrared thermography have in common? Not much of anything and that was the point! After punching cards for our FORTRAN programs to model the reactor at the Yankee Rowe Nuclear plant for several years I was quite bored. Often I would walk through the plant and wonder what a Mechanical Engineer is doing programming anyway? What’s all this equipment and why is it so hot? I understood the reactor side of the plant but not the steam side.

So I started asking questions…