Electric heating conductors are used as heat tape for a lot of procedures. Most of the times there is the problem to link the heating conductor very close to the heated mainbody. Normally the heating conductor is pressed on the piece that has to be heated or – if possible – put into the grooves. This, however, is only a partial contact and has a bad heat transfer. An improvement can be reached through soldering. A disadvantage of this proces is that the manual soldering applyies the high-grade steel surface badly and the surface can also be damaged through partial overheating.
All those disadvantages can be avoided by the procedure of galvanisation. A perfect connection between galvanic copper, heating conductor and main body are an important condition for that. Therefore every main- and heating conductor material needs a special prepraparation.
Using the exaple of a chargeexchange channel for neative helium ions, a so called “Lithium-Stove” we want to demonstrate the advantages of the galvanical procedure.
The “Lithium-Stove” (see below in the sketch) has to be heated to 600°C in action as fast as possible.
American producers coiled heating conductors onto coppercylinders for that purpose and clipped it with spring dowl pins. Because of the bad contacts this lead to many outages that not only meant the loss of a heating conductor but also interrupted the researchoperations and left behind a feeling of insecurity.
The operator, the institute of solid object research Jülich made the proposal to galvanise the heating conductor. The result was a fourtimes faster heating time and a 10 times longer life-time.
Galvanized heating conductor
Advantages of the procedure
Almost every metallic mainbody can be assembled with a heating conductor and be coated afterwards. Synthetics can be coated with a metalic layer and also be heated. The process of galvanisation is done at room temperature – therefore warping and losses in firmness are impossible. Partial treating is possible because areas that are not to be galvanised can be masked. When heating conductors are in a larger distanced to one another the copper’s conductivity leads to an ideal distribution of temperature.
Heat conductance of Galvano-T Copper: 350-400 W/mx K