Engineers at Sabic UK Petrochemicals (Redditch, UK) have improved equipment monitoring in hazardous areas with the help of ATEX explosion-proof digital cameras.
CorDEX Instruments' (Middlesbrough, UK) ToughPIX 2303XP has been adopted by Sabic UK’s site engineering team at the company's Teesside petrochemicals plant, which has resulted in time savings across a number of projects.
Asset surveys, maintenance programs and fire safety measures are key priorities at industrial sites and high quality digital photography enables engineering teams to work more effectively, ensuring that equipment and systems are running efficiently and safely.
Encased in aluminum with a display protected by armored glass, the ToughPIX camera can capture still and moving images in AVI format of up to 10 Mpixels. The device is also ATEX and American CSA certified to take images within Zone 1 IIC T4 and Class 1 Division I B, C, D hazardous areas.
According to assistant technical engineer Wayne Douthwaite, images captured by the camera have enabled maintenance teams to view the pipe work and associated instrumentation that had to be disconnected and removed as part of a tank decommissioning project. Without the camera, this would have required a member of the team to point out or mark the assets before work could begin.
CorDEX Instruments has also developed CorDEX Connect - a desktop package that allows users to exclusively organize and manage information and images taken in the field with the ToughPIX 2300XP series.
-- by Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design