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Date
Let me begin this post with a story from my own engineering work from long, long, ago.
I was a test engineer in a department that specialized in testing and troubleshooting the difficult, “dog” circuit boards that failed manufacturing test (yes, manufacturing, in the United States. I told you it was long, long ago!). These were telecom circuit boards with complex designs, featuring analog to digital conversions, signal processing, and usually containing hundreds of integrated circuits (chips). When they passed test – fine. When they failed, usually the sophisticated automated test sets, or technicians equipped with data analyzers and oscilloscopes could trace the problem. But there always a few outliers that were hard to troubleshoot – the dogs. And it was expensive inventory to have these hanging around – and although junking them was an option, if there was a way to find the problem, not only did it make one more product available, it also gave the designers and test engineers useful information for redesigning the product or the process.
So I went on a hunt for a way to solve these ‘animals’. And I ended up using a solution called thermal imaging to get a thermal signature of a good circuit board and to compare it to a 'dog'. Often, this led to finding very interesting flaws, such as capacitors with slightly leaky dielectrics, or ‘soft short circuits” between layers on multilayer circuit boards. Thermal imaging worked very well on the 'dogs'.
I was always impressed with the system’s ability to show fractions of a degree centigrade in different colors. In fact, when I demonstrated this to other engineers in the company one day, in a large auditorium, after setting up the infrared camera in the back of the room, I noticed two bright hot spots on the carpet in the center of the room. I mean, these were bright red-orange flare-ups on the carpet, near the viewgraph machine (yes, it was that long ago!). I wondered if there was some kind of heating system between floors, or a mouse under the carpet – I had no idea.
Turns out: these two spots were the signature of my own knees. I had been setting up the viewgraph machine (once again, this was long ago!) in the center of the room, and my kneeling down for a few moments on the carpet was enough to leave those “hot spots” on the carpet. So that’s some background – thermal imaging, even back then, was pretty (excuse the pun) cool. See figure below, showing the thermal image of a circuit board.
In those days, the thermal cameras actually needed liquid nitrogen (to have a known reference temperature to work with). And the cameras and associated electronics were a bit large and unwieldy.
Flash forward to 2016. Today I ran across this article (and associated broadcast snippet) from NPR’s outstanding blog called “Goats and Soda”, about applying this technology also to find “dogs” but in this case, human “animals” who in turn are poaching protected species around the world. The solution uses the same sort of thermal differentiation available in these cameras to identify human body heat – in this case the body heat of poachers – catching them in the act of killing (for example) elephants rhino, certain gazelles, and impala.
If you are interested in these green-by-definition projects, check out these other articles which also include the application of drones carrying these cameras. Check out this article from NBC News, and this one from The Observer, and this one from Popular Science - of particular interest to project managers because of its radical scope change that occurred midstream.
Your animal instincts know that project management and sustainability are intertwined. This is just some more proof.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: April 17, 2016 06:16 PM |
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