Thermal Imaging Photos of Air Cooled Engine

[John P]

There is a cool thread over on the 356 Registry (http://porsche356registry.org/356talk/1/27816.html) where I guy took thermal images after a 20 mile drive in his '64 356. My assumption is that a Beetle would look very similar.









Very cool (or hot).

J

[madoski]

Very cool indeed! Thanks for posting this.  I've always wondered what it would look like if someone did this paying particular attention to the cyl. head area in order to see how much of a difference CHT gauge thermocouple placement really makes.  It looks like these photos don't really have enough resolution to be able to tell something like that (temp of the whole engine looks pretty uniform here, but there has to be slight differences).

[Ohio Tom (DdK)]

IR imagry is allways cool. It gives insight into machines.
We use them alot at work.
The colors are all dependent on how it is scaled. Minor differences can be brought to light by adjusting the scaling, however, you will lose other part of the image that make it recognizable. So, you choose a scaling that gives you a good image that is visible to the naked eye.

[John P]

Interesting.

The owner said that there was no direct correlation of color to temperature, but it would be cool to know. I'd love to see it after a 1 hour blast in a canyon in the dessert.

[madoski]

Interesting.

The owner said that there was no direct correlation of color to temperature, but it would be cool to know. I'd love to see it after a 1 hour blast in a canyon in the dessert.

That's a strange comment for him to make.  The whole point of thermal imaging is to give a relative scale of heat radiating from an object (don't know a lot about it, but it would make sense that the imager is picking up radiant heat, but not convective or conductive).  If you've got an extra $2k laying around, you can buy one for yourself!  http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=thermal+imager&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=16472856872473557266#

[JVance]

That's a strange comment for him to make.  

Not necessarily; the range in color intensity shown in the photos does not reflect the actual range in temperature (e.g. everything above ~180-200 F is the same intensity). Therefore, no correlation exists.

He likely chose a range of color intensities to produce the most artistic rendition of the thermal image; and in doing so, limited the range of temperatures that could otherwise be differentiated from the color scale.