Stop trying to make standard heating lamps work for your battery R&D
If you’ve spent any time in a battery lab, you know the frustration. You’ve got a prototype cell ready for testing, but you can’t find a heating element that actually fits. Standard off-the-shelf lamps are usually too long, too weak, or just the wrong shape. You end up hacking your test rig to fit the lamp, rather than the other way around. We think that’s backwards. That’s why we build custom NIR (Near-Infrared) lamps—even if you only need one single unit for a small-scale test. The nitty-gritty on power and heat Here is the thing about NIR lamps: it’s all about the tungsten filament and the quartz tube. If you want to ramp up the temperature of a cell quickly, you need a high wattage packed into a short space. That creates massive heat density. It’s the secret to fast thermal cycling. Just a heads-up, though—make sure your power supply is actually built for the voltage you choose. Whether you’re running a standard 220V or something low-voltage, you don’t want to fry your filament on the very first run. Quartz and the little details We use high-purity quartz because it lets the radiation get through the battery casing without a fight. And since labs can be messy, we can add specific coatings to the glass. This can help shift the emission spectrum or just keep the tube from getting ruined by chemical splashes. We also handle the connectors—R7s, Sk15, whatever you’re using. You can just plug it into your current controller and get to work. No need to spend your afternoon fabricating new brackets. Real-world lab talk The best part of going custom? You stop compromising. You get the exact length and power you need for your specific sample. But a word of caution: these high-density lamps put out a lot of waste heat. It gets hot. Really hot. Make sure your ventilation or cooling system can handle the extra warmth around the chamber, or you might end up overheating your sensors.