Bottlehead Forum

RE: OT: Induction heating of work tables?

147.145.40.44

In Reply to: RE: OT: Induction heating of work tables? posted by AlecJ on March 02, 2008 at 21:06:05

My other hobby is astronomy and we deal with the issue of dew all the time. (A super high quality telescope doesn't do you much good with a layer of dew on the optics).

The requirement is to keep the surfaces a couple degrees warmer than the ambient air. You can do this open loop or closed loop. In most applications open loop actually works fine because if its 5 degrees warmer than ambient instead of 2 it doesn't matter. For actual viewing use we do use closed loop systems because we need to keep the surfaces just barely warm enough, too much causes thermal current in the air that ruins "seeing". But for storage purposes the usual technique is a light bulb!

Induction heating just seems way to complicated for this. The two solutions that come to mind are a bunch of resistors glued to the bottom of the tables with a low voltage power supply feeding them or a light bulb. You probably only need something like 10 watts max. Its much better to do it with a bunch of small wattage resistor covering a large surface area than one big one stuck in the middle.

In many cases the light bulb is really the simplest most effective method. The only reason not to use it is if the light itself is a problem (which is why we don't use them while actually using a telescope) or when most of the surface area of the table cannot be "seem" from a single light bulb.

A 100 watt bulb is probably way overkill in most situations. I used a 12 watt bulb to keep my scope dry out in the garrage, it worked great. Remember if its 35 degrees outside you are only trying to raise the table to 37 or 38 degrees, it doesn't take a lot of power to do this.

John S.

Follow Ups:

RE: OT: Induction heating of work tables? - intojazz 18:20:07 03/03/08 (0)
Lightbulb flashback - tonyb_2k 15:41:12 03/03/08 (0)

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