Photovoltaic Thermography

A combination that is quite impressive!

Our hexacopter in combination with a thermal and infrared camera is the ideal platform for thermal imaging applications. The stable flight characteristics of the hexacopter coupled with its dual axis stabilized camera mount generates crisp high-resolution thermal images from the air for example of large-scale solar power plants, industrial buildings and wind turbines.

Workswell WIRIS Thermal IR camera for UAV

With the ultra light fully radiometric infrared camera system specially developed for use on a UAV creates high-quality thermal images. With the live video package you have full control over the image section of the infrared camera.

Objective: Defect analysis of industrial plants and buildings using informative thermal imaging from optimal angles.

Advantages

  • Quality improvement due to an innovative inspection process where high-resolution thermal images of the solar panels are seen from above where the whole area down to the finer details can be inspected
  • Autonomous flight using GPS Navigation
  • Route planning (flight planning software)
  • Visual inspection
  • Seamless inspection protocol (post-PC)
  • Time saving and more economical than conventional methods
  • Modular system / copter and camera can be used independently

Inspection of roof-mounted systems

The use of aerial thermal imaging is an innovative and economical way of ensuring that the calculated return of a solar panel system is met. An examination immediately after commissioning of the system provides an informative reference for subsequent follow-up measurements. Only through aerial thermal imaging inspections can defects and inefficiencies be detected timely and cost effectively.

Conventional methods

  • Safety critical environment
  • Access to the module can be burdensome and difficult
  • Risk of falling from the roof
  • To avoid electric shock, the system must be shut down for the period of the inspection period resulting in loss of production time.

Advantages of aerial thermography

  • Early detection of faults on the solar modules (hot-spots)
  • Optimal recording angle for thermal imaging
  • No measurements on the current modules necessary
  • Employees are not exposed to hazards
  • Enormous cost reduction through the use of Aibotix X6 UAS

Thermography of solar power plants

The Aibotix X6 is the ideal system for inspectionapplications of large-scale solar power plants. Equipped with the “Thermal and Infrared Imager WIRIS 640 2nd generation” the Aibotix X6 is able to take high resolution thermal images.

Advantages

  • Error identification from high altitudes through high-quality video
  • Classification error by approaching the perfect shooting angle
  • Orientation of defective solar modules through the Georeferencing-GPS
  • GPS waypoint navigation / planning / automated 3D Modeling (3rd Party Software)
  • Real-time telemetry to track the flight on a PC
  • Subsequent analysis on PC

Detailed example images