Idaho Airships, Inc.

It is my honor to announce the activation of a new business in Idaho: Votum Thermography, LLC. Votum Thermo is the product of four Idaho resident Principals: Lee & Lea Cotten, Jeff Pelletier, and myself.

Thermography is the production of photographs and videographs, but rather than sense visible band light, thermography senses the temperature signature of objects. Like visible band light, these temperature signatures are electromagnetic energy-they behave much light light does in terms of reflecting off of things and traveling in a straight line. However, visible band light occupies a relatively small span in the electromagnetic spectrum (from about 380 to about 780 billionths of a meter in wavelength). Thermographically-sensed electromagnetic energy occupies a much more substantial span of from about 900 to about 14,000 billionths of a meter.

Thus, thermography occupies a span that is approximately 32 times as large as visible band light. The analogy is imperfect, but thermography also provides that much more useful information in certain applications. Bear with me.

We have already used thermography from an aircraft to assay suspected archaeological sites in the Snake River Plain. The compacted soil of trails holds heat longer that the less-compacted surrounding soils, and provides a different thermal signature-even if its been reclaimed by some vegetation. Here’s a product from that performance.

We’ve also used thermography to ensure that a manufacturing process produces a particular temperature so that materials perform as they should. This could not be accomplished easily with contact sensors (thermocoupling)-it took us a matter of seconds. It also produced a very, very cool video:

We’ve:

• Identified hot hard drives in a server array;
• Taken a census of animals in a field;
• Located a pipe beneath concrete;
• Nondestructively identified insulation gaps in structures;
• Diagnostically imaged livestock;
• Identified gaps in masonry core fill;
• Identified a cool cylinder on an aircraft engine;
• Located water suspected to be seeping from a canal;
• Assayed roofing projects from the air to identify those requiring coring/repair.

Soon we’ll be thermographically monitoring a high performance radiator to identify possible stenosing in the tubing (it’s a gorgeous “hot rod” Mustang and we might be able to sweet-talk the owner into giving us a ride, eh Kevin?). We’ll probably look at the block too, since we can tell if a bearing is perhaps torqued a bit too tight or operating inefficiently.

One of the most telling results we produced was in imaging a condemned home that had already been forensically appraised three times-Lee (a certified Thermographer) was able to noninvasively determine that parts of the home showed characteristics consistent with those of a mobile home, and in fact it was later determined that the structure was indeed constructed around a mobile home. That obviously had some effect on its appraised value.

Thermography is classically used to diagnose in electrical circuitry. The following is an image of a stunningly simple diagnosis-it is of a power panel in a school building, and in a matter of seconds it was easy to determine that one circuit needed investigating. Please see if you can determine which breaker/circuit might have a problem:

Yes, it’s that quick and easy.

Now, the truth is that except for locating hot breakers or circuits Thermography is actually very technical-it’s not a matter of pointing the camera at the subject. You even have to set the distance and ambient air temperature in the camera to get reliable radiometrics-then you have to account for emissivity, reflectance, and so on. The fact is that Votum isn’t using a $10K camera-that wouldn’t even rent it for a month.

Here is Votum’s website.

L