Unique Process Heater for Air Duct Application

May 25, 2023

One thing that continues to amaze me about this job is the wide variety of applications that present themselves. Recently I had the opportunity to quote a different style of air heater for a customer in the textiles industry. This customer required a heater for the oven within their manufacturing process. Tempco has provided many duct heaters over the years, but this application required a unique configuration.

A standard forced-air duct heater design can be characterized as standard or finned tubular heating elements mounted to a square flange termination housing. The number of heating elements is dependent on the application. These process heaters can be designed for high-pressure or hazardous locations. Tempco custom designs these air heaters to fit into the duct with air flow directed in one direction across the heating unit.

Instead of the standard duct heater design, this oven application required a circular configuration which consisted of a dozen tubular heating elements connected for 360° air flow. Tempco was provided with following specifications:

Duct diameter of 23 inches
Maximum Terminal Box height of 8.75 inches
Approximate temperature of 500°F

The heater was designed with three-phase wiring and two separate circuits. This allows the customer to use the heater in two different ways depending on how much heat is required - operating just half of the elements or operating all twelve of the elements. This duct heater posed some new challenges in both the design and manufacturing processes such as wiring configuration and assembly due to the space limitations. However, the Tempco engineering and production teams were able to work through these challenges and provide the required design to our customer.

360° Duct Heater for Oven Application