Understanding the Role of Thermography in Energy Auditing and Drone (UAV) Application
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/17th March 2016, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Leyla Norooz, Jon E. Froehlich/ The building sector accounts for 41% of primary energy consumption in the US, contributing an increasing portion of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. With recent sensor improvements and falling costs, auditors are increasingly using thermography—infrared (IR) cameras—to detect thermal defects and analyze building efficiency. Research in automated thermography has grown commensurately, aimed at reducing manual labor and improving thermal models.
Though promising, we could find no prior work exploring the professional auditor’s perspectives of thermography or reactions to emerging automation. To address this gap, we present results from two studies: a semi-structured interview with 10 professional energy auditors, which includes design probes of five automated thermography scenarios, and an observational case study of a residential audit. We report on common perspectives, concerns, and benefits related to thermography and summarize reactions to our automated scenarios. Our findings have implications for thermography tool designers as well as researchers working on automated solutions in robotics, computer science, and engineering.
One reason for these high emissions is building age. Residential buildings, for example, constitute 95% of all buildings in the US and are on average over 50 years old. Most were constructed using energy inefficient designs and their materials have degraded over time. To address these issues, renovations and retrofits of existing building stock has become a pressing need. The US Department of Energy (DOE), for example, has set a goal of reducing housing energy use by up to 70%.
As a response, professional energy auditing has seen a resurgence of interest. Audits help identify building inefficiencies through walk-through inspections, on-site measurements, and computer simulations. The DOE recommends home energy audits because of their impact on reducing energy usage (e.g., 5-30% reductions in monthly utility bills) and increasing structural safety. With recent improvements in handheld sensor technology and falling costs, auditors are increasingly using thermo-graphy—infrared (IR) scanning with thermal cameras—to detect thermal defects and air leakage.
Work in automated thermography has also grown markedly in the past three years, encompassing disciplines from computer science and robotics to environmental and civil engineering. Researchers have primarily explored technical approaches for automatically transforming thermal images into higher fidelity 3D representations of buildings and employing robots for data collection. However, user studies of these tools have not been performed. Thus, researchers are increasingly using robots for data collection, including ground-based rovers for indoor thermography and UAVs for outdoor thermography.
The full research paper you can download from here: Understanding the Role of Thermography in Energy Auditing: Current Practices and the Potential for Automated SolutionsCurrent Practices and the Potential for Automated Solutions
