How do you fix a problem you can't even see?
In smaller systems, it's not that hard. Air leak on your tire, just throw some soapy water on it
and find the bubbles. Easy, but in a larger system,
like our workshop's compressed air hoses, it could take a fluke to find a tiny leak somewhere.
A fluke II915 acoustic imager to be exact.
This $25,000 handheld camera does not work
like a normal camera, you know, taking in light and transforming it into internet cloud.
Instead, it takes in sound and uses it to find leaks
and equipment malfunctions, even detecting noises
beyond the range of human hearing. It then represents that audio like a heat map.
So let's see if we can use it to find some really useful stuff like the leak in our system
and maybe even a segue to our sponsor.
Like so many of our videos, this one was prompted by an actual problem.
That, obviously it helps a little that we shoot most of our workshop videos
on the other side of this wall, but it's still been a major source of disruptions
over the last few years. Now, an obvious solution would be to just
not have a compressed air system, but that's not really an option.
We use it for everything from cleaning things off to cutting and polishing to hacking things apart.
Excuse me. And I've done a fair bit of sandblasting with it too,
mostly for my personal motorbike project. So, okay, we need an air compressor.
Deal with it, right? Well, see, it wouldn't be that big of a problem,
except that somewhere in the system is a leak.
So the compressor goes off way more often,
disrupting us way more often than it needs to.
That's where Fluke's acoustic imager comes in. Theoretically with this, in a matter of minutes,
I should be able to track down the leak, saving us both time and money.
Theoretically, I'm gonna put that to the test. I've never actually used this before,
so I don't know how I'm gonna tell the difference between RHVAC system and air leaking out of a hose,
but presumably it's pretty easy.
Oh, there's something in this wall.
Oh, there's something bouncing off this wall, I think.
You'll get a lot of sounds reflecting from that sometimes.
That makes sense. Keep an eye on the right side,
and you'll see the range of frequency band that it's looking for.
Okay, I feel like I could move pretty quickly at this point.
Oh, hello, Captain, I think we've found something.
Right there. Okay, but would I even be able to hear this?
Oh, I can. I would have to be within like 10 inches of it, though.
One to go? And that took like two minutes.
Oh, geez. Okay, once you know what you're looking for,
it stands out like a beacon.
Oh yeah, this one's a lot more obvious.
So between these two, this one was a pretty substantial one.
We found both of them within just a couple minutes. This is a lot like the video Adam Savage
did with this thing, hey? Two cool people can have the same cool idea
at the same time. Adam Savage and ElectroBoom.
And also me, just slower. I wanna show you guys,
separate from the video mode, you can put it in leak Q mode.
This allows you to take a picture of a leak,
then according to your settings. So gas price, compression energy cost,
as well as your currency, it will tell you how much that leak
is gonna cost you a year. I had no idea that just a little air leak
could cost $45 a year. So replacing the fitting is a no-brainer.
That assumes it's running all year. I mean, it is running all year.
We never turn it off. Like that's the whole thing with a leak. It's like a faucet, right?
Like every once in a while, drip will waste like more gallons in a month
than you could possibly fathom. Now, obviously, if the only gases you're working with
are compressed air, it would take a little while for an investment like this
to pay for itself. But in certain industries, this could be worth its weight in gold in cost savings.
Now, while the workshop team gets those fittings sorted out, I'm gonna go see what else this thing can do.
The magic of this device is really in its algorithm and precise calibration.
The hardware itself is pretty simple. This array of 64 microphones
is arranged in a logarithmic spiral to capture sound,
and it uses beamforming to determine the source of the sound.
Then it overlays that on the camera image as what Fluke calls a sound map.
In the default mode, a sound map looks an awful lot like a heat map.
All of this is possible because the microphones are all in known locations relative to both each other
as well as to the camera right in the center. So sound hits the array and with a little bit of maths,
the source can be determined by analyzing the reception delays.
There are some limitations though. It's microphones pick up sound between two kilohertz
and 100 kilohertz, which is well above the range of human hearing.
So if you wanted to find something like a small liquid leak,
say in our water cooling loop here, the frequency of a drip drip drip
might actually be too low for the Fluke to pick up.
Fortunately, we have an idea for that. Why not turn our liquid leak into
an air leak? All we need to do is pressurize our loop.
Well, that was easy. Oh, you put a hole in the tube.
Usually the leaks are a lot smaller than that in these water cooling systems.
I kind of wanna know if it can handle a much smaller leak like an O-ring issue or something.
Every once in a while, especially on hard line fittings, these O-rings will go missing
and the system can look like it's all sealed up, but when that drip gets on the back of your GPU,
you're gonna have a pretty bad time. Put this up in the blue zone.
You can see, even though there's no O-ring in there, it's sealed right now,
but let's see if our Fluke can pick it up. Oh, dude.
Easy. And that is a much, much smaller leak.
What a trouble saver that would be. Now it is worth noting that our brilliant strategy
of just emptying the loop and pumping it up
isn't gonna work in every situation. Clean rooms, for instance,
need to maintain strict control of airborne contaminants.
And one of the ways that they do this is by building them to be fairly airtight
and to maintain positive pressure inside, not a ton of pressure,
cause like humans need to work in there, but some pressure.
So how would they track down then a low pressure leak?
Turns out the answer is Fluke's Beacon. This little device emits sound at 40,000 Hertz,
well beyond what would bother any human. You just pop it into your system, seal it up,
tune it to 40,000 Hertz, and theoretically we should be able to find our leak.
I can definitely detect it through the acrylic now, but our system may be too complex
for such a short wavelength to travel through like that.
It's probably just because this knows there's sound coming from here or somewhere off the side,
and so it's not gonna pick up the same frequency somewhere else. Hold it up over there then.
Oh, dude, bingo. You know what, this would be a great opportunity
to check the multiple source feature here. Ooh, yeah.
So in acoustics, we can click multiple sources,
and then, oh, dude, that's so cool.
It'll show the different levels, however, those still totally overpower it.
Really? Yeah, it really doesn't care about this leak unless it's the only one on screen.
That's so funny. Very interesting.
Wonder what else we could use this for? A really cool application for acoustic imagers
is identifying problems with transmission towers at a distance, say, from the ground.
It apparently works at up to 120 meters, or 393 feet,
and can be used to detect partial discharge or arcing,
the sort of thing that could lead to a forest fire. Now, we don't have anything like that to test,
but we do have some whiny electronics like this GPU
that has some coil wine. Now, coil wine isn't dangerous like those transmission tower problems.
It's just vibrations in board components,
specifically the coils, as electricity passes through. It's just, it can be pretty flipping annoying.
Now, you can see that I'm not picking anything up right now. That's because this GPU isn't under load.
Let's just plug in our keyboard using a handy-dandy TrueSpec cable from lttstore.com
and fire up a GPU-intensive application.
There it is, but where is it coming from specifically?
There's a hotspot right where the 12 volt two by six
comes into the back of the board. Yep, it's right across the back of the card
where all the VRMs would be. Doesn't really help us solve the problem, but now we know.
Actually, I had another situation very recently where coil wine was driving me absolutely nuts.
I used these USB fiber optic docks
in order to have my system downstairs, but my monitor and all of my peripherals upstairs.
I was hearing this like high-pitched, almost like a CRT TV in the next room.
Why? Now I was like, can anyone else hear that? Where is that coming from? Everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy.
I'm having trouble getting it to go lower. Change the decibels from automatic to manual.
It's trouble-loat when you get into the low frequencies because if you talk, you can actually see it.
Exactly, when it's something that you can hear, like coil wine, it's always gonna be
in the frequency that we can hear, so it can be a little bit of trouble.
Right at like 10,000 Hertz.
That's not even that high-pitched. Why couldn't anybody else hear this? It was driving me freaking nuts.
Everyone can hear 10,000 Hertz, right? Some with hearing loss or significant age-related
hearing decline might struggle to detect it. So you shouldn't have had any problems.
Listen, listen. It's really cool how adjusting the frequency band,
as well as the sensitivity, can really help you dial it in
to detect particular things. Of course, your next question is probably,
but what can I do about coil wine Linus? Some people have reported success
putting schmoo over these vibrating components, but your mileage, not to mention your warranty,
may vary. Is this kind of analysis a practical application for such an expensive device?
Yeah, probably not, but there are more affordable options
for this sort of thing. The Fluke II 500 is about eight and a half thousand dollars,
but is just limited to the leak Q functionality
that we showed you guys earlier with a more limited frequency band.
Our II 915 has some added functions like mech Q,
which detects things like a faulty bearing in an assembly line to help identify and fix problems
during planned downtime, rather than when they just come up unexpectedly.
But if you want to go even cheaper, you totally can. Other options are out there,
and there are even open source acoustic imagers. The Cessenta, a modular system, looks like a standout.
Of course, that sort of thing means that the calibration is entirely up to the user.
If you're a business fan, you might not want to deal with that. All right, do you think they're done
with the fixes in the shop? How'd all the fixes go? We're thinking the regulator was leaking.
It may have been the hose, but we swapped both out. I wanted to replace the hoses anyway.
The connection before was questionable at best. Tore the regulator down, rebuilt it, and no leaks at all.
Sometimes you just have to take it apart and put it back together.
This one was a little bit different. I knew that there was a leak in here because this wasn't tight enough,
but I discovered that there was also an O-ring missing in her fasteners.
Just completely missing? Yeah, I was actually quite surprised
that it wasn't leaking worse than it was, but we ended up getting it put back in
and now it's good and tight. So that was never in there?
No. The whole time. Yeah.
So it was only the two leaks? That was it? Well then, what is this that I'm picking up right now?
Oh, I knew it. It's another segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did on a Caterpillar branded smartphone
that has a FLIR thermal camera built into it? That was pretty cool.