Active thermal imaging of natural gas leakages

Summary form only given. The contemporary world gas industry shows great demand in development of control instrumentation for gas dispatch networks as well as for the areas of its distribution. There are two main reasons of this interest: economy-large losses connected with uncontrolled gas leakages, precautionary measures-several serious accidents in many countries. Thermal imaging is one of the most promising techniques of detection of gas leakages. It can be realized by passive scene observation or by observation of the results of background irradiation using thermal or laser sources. The paper presents an active thermal system, utilizing 1 mW He-Ne laser transmitter with thermal camera TheramCAM 250 Inframetrix. The system was connected to camervid Sharp VLE70 to register the chosen parts of thermograms. The transformations of thermal pictures were made using the computer programs ThermaGRAM Inframetrics and PTRWIN (CEDIP).