Continuous thermal monitoring for switchgear, busbars and breakers.
Patented Thermalpas sensors sit on busbars, breakers and cable lugs inside closed panels. Their readings stay close to the true surface temperature around the clock, so changes inside the conductor can be tracked. OctosX flags a developing hotspot, and records it, while it is still a repair.
What your maintenance team sees.
One screen per site: panel temperatures, the thresholds crossed, and the equipment to check first.
Screens are configured per site during commissioning.
Click through the live demo yourself: open the morning briefing →
Heat builds between inspections.
Most sites check their electrical rooms with a handheld thermal scanner a few times a year. A loose lug or an overloaded breaker can heat up in the weeks in between: behind a closed panel door, at 2 a.m., with nobody watching.
One door, two ways of looking
- A snapshot, not a watch
- A scan round sees one moment. Heat that builds up between rounds goes unseen.
- Closed doors, hidden joints
- A camera needs line of sight. The hottest spot is often inside a joint, behind a cover, where it can't look.
- Nights, weekends, peak load
- Faults don't keep office hours. The worst heat often comes at peak load, when no one is doing a round.
Read from the conductor
Reads the real surface, so changes inside the joint come through.
What gets monitored, and what happens when it heats up.
Sensors sit where faults heat first: joints, lugs, terminations.
Where would you set the line?
Drag the warning and critical thresholds on this trace and watch the alert behaviour change.
Open the threshold simulator
Why Thermalpas reads closer to the conductor.
Most contact sensors read through a poorly conducting layer and settle well below the true surface. Patented Thermalpas conducts heat and reads close to it.
Inside Thermalpas · 3D anatomy
How the patch is built, and why surface contact matters.
- 00The M-type patch
A thin, flexible disc with a raised centre and a single lead. It bonds flat to the conductor, so the whole face is in contact.
- 01Waterproof bonding layer
Bonds the patch to the conductor and seals its edge against water.
- 02Thermally conductive interface
Carries heat from the conductor surface to the sensing element quickly, across the whole contact face rather than one point.
- 03Sealed sensing element
Senses the temperature that reaches it through the interface, sealed away from moisture.
- 04Waterproof insulation layer
Shields the element from outside temperature and insulates it electrically, so the reading reflects the surface beneath rather than the room air.
- 05Chemical-resistant surface layer
Protects the outer face of the patch from the surrounding environment.
- 06Sealed cable exit and lead
Fixes the lead and seals the cable exit; the lead carries the signal out.
- 00The same warm joint
A bolted busbar joint warming under load. Its heat spreads across the copper surface on both sides.
- 01A conventional probe touches a point
The probe meets the surface at one small spot. Little heat passes through so small a contact, so its reading can settle below the true surface temperature.
- 02Thermalpas covers a surface
The patch bonds flat across an area of the conductor, and heat flows into it through the whole contact face and a thermally conductive layer.
- 03Closer to the surface, tracks the inside
The reading stays close to the real surface temperature, so changes inside the conductor can be followed more reliably. It tracks internal changes; it does not measure internal temperature directly.
- 00The patented structure
An exploded view of the patented sensing stack, drawn above the conductor it is bonded to.
- 01Outer sheets
Thin face sheets hold the stack together and open a window onto the surface being measured.
- 02Heat absorber
Sits in that window, in contact with the surface, and gathers its heat.
- 03Sensing body
Shown resting on the absorber, so heat reaches it through a short, thermally conductive path.
- 04Conduction parts
Shown here linking the sensing body towards the lead, so its signal can leave the stack.
- 05Waterproof unit
Seals the sensing parts so water cannot reach them.
- 06Heat-resistant layer
Backs the stack and blocks outside heat, so the reading follows the surface underneath and, through it, changes inside the conductor.
The result · what each sensor reads
Same surface, two readings.
A pair of reading bars, a cross-section and a trend chart. The reading bars compare each sensor with the true surface temperature mark: the Thermalpas bar almost reaches it; the conventional bar stops far below it. In the cross-section, two sensors sit on the same measured object (a busbar, lug or pipe) whose surface is at temperature T_S. The conventional sensor sits on an interface layer with low thermal conductivity, so the temperature drops sharply across it and the sensor reads T_M1, well below T_S. Thermalpas sits on a thermally conductive layer, so the temperature barely drops and the sensor reads T_M2, close to T_S. In the chart, the surface temperature rises and falls over time as temperature inside the conductor changes. The Thermalpas reading follows the surface line closely. The conventional reading moves at the same time but stays well below the surface line, and its rises and falls are flattened. Conclusion: T_S is approximately equal to T_M2, which is much greater than T_M1. Because the surface temperature is measured more accurately, changes in temperature inside the conductor can be tracked more reliably; the sensor does not measure the internal temperature directly.
TS ≈ TM2 ≫ TM1
The Thermalpas layer conducts heat far better than a conventional interface layer, so its reading stays close to the true surface temperature. An accurate surface reading lets changes inside the conductor be tracked more reliably; it does not measure the internal temperature directly.
Adapted from a diagram by Prof. Masafumi Kimata, Ritsumeikan University.
Reviewed by Prof. Masafumi Kimata
Director, Integrated MEMS Sensor Laboratory, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
- 30+ years of infrared sensor R&D, formerly Mitsubishi Electric (1976–2004)
- PhD, Osaka University (1992): Schottky barrier infrared image sensors
- SPIE Fellow · IEEE member · Japan Society of Infrared Science and Technology
- JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) visiting researcher since 2009
- Japan Patent Office Commissioner Award (1992) and Ichimura Industrial Award (1988)
Prof. Kimata's lab has reviewed the Thermalpas sensor technology. A full technical brief is available on request.
Right on the heat source, inside the closed panel.
Thermalpas bonds to the conductor with no drilling and no shutdown. Its patented thermally conductive layer keeps the reading close to the true surface temperature, so changes inside the joint can be tracked, even behind covers where a camera has no line of sight.
Built for electrical rooms
- IP65–IP68 sealed; IP68 models are waterproof
- Non-conductive housing, withstand-tested up to 36 kV (TAF), depending on model
- UL94 HB flame-rated housing material
- Acid-, alkali- and corrosion-resistant
- Five years and more in service, including harsh environments
Patented Thermalpas sensor
TW M331662 · M512133 · M559531
CN ZL2010202939219
Four steps from drawings to live alerts.
Adhere outside. Follow what happens inside.
- Points per MCC room
- 30–120
- Mount
- Adhesive · no drilling
- Interruption
- None (typical)
- Reads
- Surface temp · tracks internal change
- Baseline
- Per operating cycle
Typical deployment. Each site is scoped individually.
Adhere on the outside, follow what is happening inside. Most installations need no drilling, welding or shutdown. Deployment runs in four steps.
- Site assessment. An SI partner or an OctosX engineer reviews the electrical drawings, identifies monitoring points and produces a sensor placement plan for your panel layout.
- Non-invasive installation. Sensors adhere directly to live equipment. The industrial PC and gateway are commissioned in the control room. Hazardous-area variants are available where the environment requires them.
- Baseline calibration. The system learns normal operating temperatures per node, load condition and time of day. Because Thermalpas reads close to the true surface temperature, the baseline follows the conductor more faithfully than a damped skin reading would.
- Live monitoring and alerts. Alerts follow your team's escalation paths, and the dashboard goes live for the plant manager and maintenance team.
The animation shows an electrical drawing of a motor control centre panel becoming a placement plan, sensors adhering to its joints and terminations, the gateway coming online, a baseline band forming over load and time of day, and the dashboard going live as one reading rises above its band and an alert follows the escalation path to maintenance and the plant manager.
A risk summary you can hand to someone.
Coverage, findings with evidence labels and plain-language rationale, documented limitations, and a next action for each item. Switch to the quiet day to see how a report reads when nothing is wrong.
Open the sample risk report
For the people who answer for electrical risk.
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Plant & operations
Fewer surprises on the line.
One MCC failure can take a production line down for days. OctosX keeps a documented record that your electrical equipment is monitored on every shift. The animation shows a motor control centre with a sensor on each drawer feeding a production line that keeps running while day, evening and night shifts are each checked off as monitored.
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Maintenance
Investigate an alert, not an incident.
Each alert names the sensor, the temperature trend and the time since first detection, so the team can prioritise the work and document it afterwards. The animation shows one alert card naming sensor CT-07, a temperature trend that rises from its baseline, a marker at first detection and the time since then, 12 minutes; the alert moves to the top of the work queue and the job is checked off as documented.
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Risk, insurance & brokers
A record you can review together.
A time-stamped monitoring record of readings, alerts, acknowledgments and repairs that you can review with your broker, risk advisor or auditor. The animation shows one record filling with four time-stamped entries, a reading, an alert, an acknowledgment and a repair, while two people on either side read it through together.
From a loose connection to a fixed one.
On electrical equipment, for years.
10,000 A
16.5 kV generator busbars, monitored on all three phases.
Thermalpas patches were installed without drilling or shutdown. Quarterly trend review replaced monthly thermal-camera walk-downs, about 70% less inspection labour.
Read the case →
12 sensors
Three-phase junctions inside low-voltage panels.
Thermalpas sensors on the R/S/T junctions with two thresholds (70 °C and 90 °C). Over five years, three anomalies were caught before the red threshold.
Read the case →
1,000+
Capacitor temperatures inside variable-frequency drives.
Thermalpas BCT 1100-N sensors report through the existing PLC into the fab's common alarm system. TSMC's purchase specification names the sensor as a qualified supplier.
Read the case →Beyond electrical · FPCC Mailiao power station. 276 Thermalpas RTD sensors on boiler soot-blower valves. Ten-year loss baseline before monitoring: NT$128.5M across four tube ruptures. No soot-blower-related rupture has been recorded since monitoring began.
Read the case →See what is running hot in your panels.
Tell us about the assets that worry you most. We will reply with how the sensors, the alerts and a sample risk report would apply to them.