Podcast: Using thermal imaging and acoustic monitoring to detect equipment failures early
Key takeaways
- Combining ultrasound and thermography gives a fuller, more accurate view of machine health for better maintenance decisions.
- Fixed-mount thermal tools and acoustic imaging are driving automation and early fault detection in manufacturing.
- Cross-training and tool integration help teams shift from reactive to reliability-centered maintenance strategies.
- Support, training, and customer trust are essential to getting long-term ROI from condition monitoring investments.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Thomas Wilk, chief editor of Plant Services, is joined by Maureen Gribble, North American sales enablement leader for UE Systems, and John Gould, director for global business development for condition monitoring at Flir. Ultrasound and infrared thermography tools are increasingly used together by maintenance teams that want to get a fuller picture of asset health. In this podcast episode, sponsored by UE Systems, Tom talks with Maureen and John about the ways these tools are being used in the field, including hybrid tools like acoustic imagers, as well as what the future holds for the partnership between Flir and UE Systems.
Below is an edited excerpt from the podcast:
PS: Today I'm here at the Leading Reliability Conference 2025 in Clearwater Beach, FL, with our two guests. We have Maureen Gribble, who's the North American sales enablement leader for UE Systems, and we have John Gould with us, he's director for global business development for condition monitoring at Flir.
Part of the reason we're at this conference is to explore how technologies can work together to for the benefit of assessing machine health, and so for this podcast, we're going to be talking about the kind of partnerships that both technologies and technology companies engage in to facilitate better maintenance best practices.
I'm going to start with a real high level question for you guys. What do you see when you look out in industry right now, in terms of what are the pressing needs in the maintenance sector?
MG: I think right now everybody's probably experiencing a lot of the same things with needing to do a lot more with a lot less, and having to be really strategic and use the best technologies for the right applications. The versatility that ultrasound and infrared bring to the table, make these technologies solid choices to have in your toolbox. It’s exciting that we've got this relationship now with UE Systems and Flir that we can help bring both of those technologies to our customers around the globe.
JG: I agree fully, I think a lot of where we see this partnership driving towards the common goals that our customers have. We’re all in those customers, with those customers, and our different modalities that we offer between ultrasound and thermal as the two leading tools used in that predictive or condition-based maintenance approach. As far as that being in need in the industry right now, to Maureen’s point, the expectations of not only the assets to be up and running as they should be, but also expectations of customers – things like product quality and ensuring that when that widget or when that piece of material leaves that manufacturing site it's produced in the right way – in many, many cases, what we deal with is that you have to monitor that equipment to make sure it's operating correctly, so that what is being delivered to that customer actually is what they want.
PS: Let's talk about how each of the technologies that your companies specialize in help maintenance professionals identify problems with their machines. Maureen, I’ll start with you – I've often heard that ultrasound is sort of a versatile secret weapon of the maintenance tech. What are some of the applications that you see ultrasound being applied for in plants?
MG: Yeah, we are kind of the Swiss army knife of maintenance and reliability with ultrasound being able to do so many things for our customers. Things like leak detection, which is kind of where it got our start, to testing steam traps, valves, electrical inspections (so a real safety application in that regard). Most recently in the last 15 or so years we're seeing a huge increase in the amount of folks that are using ultrasound for monitoring rotating equipment, and using it for bearing health and lubrication to really great application. Our customers see a lot of success when they implement ultrasound in all those ways.
PS: John, when it comes to thermography, what are some of the key applications that you see your customers using it for? Maybe some of the more innovative ways they're applying it?
JG: You know, those are traditional, where thermography obviously it's about temperature, measuring temperature and not what the temperature is, but what type of load the piece of equipment is under and where problem identification can happen a bit earlier in the process. So understanding that having a proper thermal scan done of your electrical equipment, your rotating assets, tying that in with other modalities as well, you get a better picture of what's happening. Where we're seeing a lot of the shift right now is in the fixed mount. We're actually seeing organizations, particularly manufacturing, move towards more autonomous solutions, and at Flir we offer a variety of different fixed solutions around this.
A big one right now is early fire detection. A lot of the spaces that are dealing with the manufacturing of electrical vehicles, battery storage, actually putting those batteries together and putting the batteries into the vehicles, we help them monitor those things. With a lot of our smart sensing tools, we're actually able to integrate with those systems that are involved in the manufacturing process for early notifications, so being able to let that customer know that there's a thermal runaway event happening before it turns into more of a catastrophic type failure.
We’re seeing a lot of a lot of push towards automation, a lot of push towards fixed mount, not taking anything away from our handheld solutions that a lot of our operators are using out on the floor on a day-to-day basis from a maintenance perspective. When you combine those tools, combine it with ultrasound, you're really getting a better picture of what's happening with those assets and I think as Maureen alluded to earlier, organizations are being asked to do more with less, so how do you do that? You do that with quality data and with the right tools. We combine those things together. You're actually going to create those actual insights that matter for where those manufacturers are today.
PS: Years ago, at a previous conference here in Clearwater, I remember talking to a practitioner who was here to understand better what ultrasound could do for his company. They had infrared thermography as a primary condition monitoring technology, and at the request of their finance team, essentially, they said “if you can locate a second condition monitoring technology which would reinforce the findings of the first one and help paint a stronger, fuller picture, we can reduce our insurance rates and help the company out in that way.” And so he was down here to learn how infrared and ultrasound could work well together.
I want to use that to lead into a question about your partnership. When your companies started talking, did you see the condition monitoring landscape that way? How did this partnership come to?
JG: I think when we first started exploring a partnership with UE, we looked at it as a complementary tool and an adjacent technology where we know our customers have the need for both, and where can we be better together? So a lot of the conversations and the longevity that both of our organizations have, there was a real opportunity to tell a better story. And I think once we had some initial successes with that prior to the full partnership, we recognized the real value in being able to have both of our teams enabled to be able to go out and really solve our customers problems.
And I think when you talk about any partnership, really what is the end goal? It's getting that customer to a place where they have the confidence that they can make a better and more informed decision. Your point is really well taken, Tom, that you know where customers are looking for reduction in insurance premiums, or reducing cost of operations, having the right tools and the right modalities in place to be able to support that from the condition-based maintenance perspective are really important. So logically it made sense. UE is the leader in ultrasound applications, and we are the leader in thermal applications, and when you combine those two together from a partnership perspective, we're really going to be able to afford our customers that complete solution.
MG: And what we can also accomplish now with this partnership is, it's one thing to invest in the technology and you get this shiny new tool and everybody's all excited about it. They leave a conference and they get pumped up about buying the latest and greatest and infrared or ultrasound. But if you don't have a support system around that, if you don't have buy-in, if you don't have the proper training, the proper support, that thing's going to end up sitting on a shelf and that doesn't serve the customer. It certainly doesn't serve companies like ours who want to have successful customers who come back and purchase more.
So having both the Flir team and the UE Systems team working together to support our customers in their plants, on their specific problems and assets, has been really helpful as well and I think our customers really appreciate that they can come to one or the other and know that they're going to get that same level of support and dedication to what they're trying to accomplish. Us being able to do that from both an ultrasound and now infrared perspective has been really amazing this last year, and I think it's a great service for our customers that they can see us supporting both those things.
JG: To take it a step further, one of the things that I found very interesting is we've done a series of joint workshops, end-customer workshops, and a lot about condition based maintenance. If you look at organizations and their “reliability maturity ladder,” you know how mature are they as an organization to be able to make the right condition-based maintenance decisions moving from reactive to planned or interval based to condition-based, it requires trust and I think a lot of what we both bring to the table is we have customers that trust that we can deliver on the solutions.
Now when you bring us together in these workshops that we've held and will continue to hold, it’s creating that visibility about how these two solutions can work together. Once customers start to recognize that they see the value of our partnership even further, where to Maureen's point, you don't have to call a clear person to talk about thermography, you can talk to a UE Systems salesperson. they understand how the technology fits into the total solution. Similarly on the ultrasound side, how our teams are working towards understanding that in a more complete way.
Things like acoustic imaging solutions, right? So we have an acoustic imaging camera that does a very quick and easy way to identify potential leaks, partial discharges, mechanical issues. Our sales teams know that that's just the starting point; in order for them to get prescriptive and to make decisions on how to maintain or make a repair, you need the Ultraprobe too. Being able to tell that more complete story, there's a real benefit to both of our organizations and it goes back to my original point. It's about helping our customers, right? We wouldn't do this partnership if there wasn't a true commitment towards customer success. For me, that's really what's probably the most valuable part, and what I've been enjoying the most is seeing our customers recognize and realize those impacts. So it's been really good.
