Development of Energy Efficient Carbon Fiber based Convective Heater

Abstract

A heating element has been developed that uses processed fibrous carbon materials to serve as a conducting base, and a suitable binder material to increase its overall strength and performance characteristics. This has been further fabricated in the form of a wall heater. The device has been designed to work on natural convection currents without any forced air blast using fans and motors. The flexibility of the material enables its use in different shapes as room heaters, decorative wall heaters, as a heating element in electric iron, hot plates, heating pads etc. Various advantageous characteristics of the carbon fiber based heating element (over the conventional nichrome wire and other carbon based heating element) that contributes in the efficient working of the heater have been discussed, the most important being its low power consumption. The heater consumes less than 200 watt of power as compared to 1-2 kW ingested by the commercial heaters.