How Do Infrared Heaters Work?
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Infrared Radiation
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Infrared radiation is a kind of electromagnetic radiation, much like light or radio waves. It is at a lower frequency than visible light and cannot be seen with the naked eye. Everything above absolute zero (the coldest temperature possible) produces some degree of infrared radiation. As an object gets warmer, it produces more infrared radiation at a higher frequency.
Infrared Heating
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There are three types of heating: convection, conduction and radiation. Convection is heating by the movement of air or water. For example, if you blow hot air past a hot coil, you are heating the room by convection. Conduction is heating by the tendency of heat to move through a material. If you leave a metal spatula in a hot pan and try to pull it out again, the handle will burn you. Even though the handle was not directly over the pan, the end of the spatula was, and the metal conducted the heat to the handle. Infrared heat is based on the third principle: radiation. Molecules tend to absorb infrared at a particular wavelength. When that absorption happens, it heats the molecule up. An infrared heater will be tuned to produce the right wavelength for whatever it is designed to heat.
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Efficiency of Infrared Heating
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The beauty of infrared heating is that it can be fine-tuned to heat one specific thing. An infrared heater has a coil or other filament with enough electricity running through it to get a very high temperature (1000 degrees Celsius or more in some infrared heaters). Depending on the temperature, it will produce a specific wavelength that interacts with a desired molecule. Infrared saunas, for example, are fine tuned to only heat water. Some infrared heaters are designed to warm water, for example. These heaters can be used to heat sore muscles, since the human body is mostly made of water. Other heaters might be designed to only heat a certain kind of plastic or metal for industrial applications. Very little of the heat is wasted, and almost all of it goes to heating the target.
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