Application of thermal imaging for detecting cold air leak location in cold storage

Abstract

Nowadays Cold storage has been playing an important role in preserving the perishable food products like fruits, vegetables, dairy products, fish, and meat etc. The major problem of cold storage is unwanted energy transmission during the operation. It is necessary to maintain the constant temperature during storing the products. There are different kinds of energy loss happening during the operation. One of the major causes is cold air leaking from the inside of the cold room to outside. It is due to poor insulation and improper maintenance of cold storage. It is very difficult to identify the exact location of the leak by the naked eye. In this research work, the cold storage was inspected with the thermal imaging system. Thermal cameras are highly sensitive to temperature and it can detect the variation of temperature ranging from 0.1°C. The measured temperatures are further converted into a colour based pattern. It is known as thermogram. These colour-based thermal patterns are further processed for identifying energy transmission location. It is done by applying various image processing methods such as histogram equalization, diffusion error, otsu thresholding and morphologic function. These techniques were applied to images of cold storages and exact cold air transmission locations were identified.