Selection Guide of Mica Band Heater
September 01, 2020Bucan Electric Heating Devices can assist with helping you select your heaters when facing the basic choices for standard designs. This memo is intended to advise your team on the basic selection requirements for Mica Bands Heaters and Mica Strip Heaters. Please note that your team still needs to make the final determinations for the best fit to meet your applications needs. We offer the guidelines and can be advisors to the process.
When choosing a Mica Band Heater, the first and most basic requirements are the physical size. For Mica Band Heaters, this would require you to know the diameter of the part the heater will be placed on. For this example, we will select a 6” OD Pipe. Going hand and hand with the diameter, you will need to advise the length of the pipe that will be covered. If you have a 24” long section to be covered, the first thought would be to make a 24” wide heater. In order to best meet your needs, it is a general practice to keep the width of your heater no greater that the diameter of your heater. So in this case, we selected a 6” Diameter, so to cover this the most appropriately, we would select 6” wide and require 4 pcs to get the entire 24” length covered. So we now have a basic size of 6” ID x 6” wide. Please be advised that this is a basic generality and different ratios can be built if discussed with our design team. For Mica Strip Heaters, a simple length and width would need to be provided.
Once you have selected the general size of your Mica Band Heater, the power requirements to produce heat are needed. This is normally done by a thermal equation to determine the total power required. In order to simplify the process, you can also design the power by the available size with a specific watt density. The first specification is the voltage and it is normally the power available to the machine or location that the heater will be installed. In this example we will use 240v. With a known voltage, we can determine the contact surface area of the heater and apply an appropriate watt density. This heater selected was 6” ID x 6” wide. Taking the ID multiplied by PI(3.14) multiplied by the width we would arrive with (6” *3.14 * 6” = 113.04 sq inches) The typical watt density for a mica heater is 15-20 watts per sq inch, so we would multiply by the projected watt density and obtain the appropriate power for this size heater. ( 113.04 x 20 = 2260watts ) With this calculation, we have arrive at a Mica band Heater 6” ID x 6” wide, 2260w 240v.
You would then select the type of connection you would prefer to use to connect your Mica Band Heater to the power supply. The most common and basic is to have Screw Terminals on the heater and bring your own connection wire directly to the heater. This is cost effective and you are not paying premium for additional connection wire for every Industrial Process Heaters purchased. We have many options for connections such as high temp wire, braided wire, direct plugs, terminal boxes, etc. These can be found in our literature and website.