I need to heat up a part of a circuit up to 300°C with ideally a 1.5V alkaline battery and I honestly have very little idea of how this stuff works. I was wondering if a short circuit constructed from a copper wire (60cm in length), tungsten wire (~0.5cm in length) and a 1.5V alkaline battery would work. The length of the wires comes from physical restraints. Will this just burn the battery before it even reaches the desired temperature? Is there possibly a way better solution to solving such a problem (300°C, 1.5V battery)?
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This depends on the thickness of the tungsten wire. You can get really thick wires intended for high currents or thin wires for low currents. But 300 degrees is not very high so I would suspect that you can reach this in your setup. However the tungsten is going to burn up very fast when heated in atmosphere.
The battery doesn’t care about temperature so much as current, and at any particular current you can get hotter by putting the same resistance in a smaller volume. Such as using a shorter length of thinner resistance wire.
Bigger battery cell can supply more current. Find a datasheet for your size of battery.
Batteries do not put out a constant 1.5v, it will be more like 0.8v when the battery is close to dead. You’re not going to get an accurate temperature without some kind of feedback to control the current.
power = current * voltage
current = voltage/resistance
What are you actually trying to accomplish?
That’s exactly what happens with a 1.5 Volt incandescent light bulb, except much hotter than 300C. If you applied 1.5 Volts to a bulb rated for a higher voltage then it won’t get as hot; if you’re only heating to 300C then you could break the glass away and it’ll probably work just fine (if you can keep the filament intact).
Let’s think about power: (mwahahaha)
In most wires as temp rises, so does resistance -> for given voltage over time less current will flow
This power will dissipate as heat and then be transferred away from the wire, the hotter, the faster the transfer -> system will find equilibrium based on material properties of the wire (electricity and heat transfer wise) and the geometry (also voltage of course)
You could get these properties and formulae from a datasheet (might wanna search nichrome wire)
[https://www.jacobs-online.biz/calculators.htm](https://www.jacobs-online.biz/calculators.htm) I found this calc on a site that sells those wires, this might already be your answer.
Oh and also, wire that is meant for that stuff will NOT burn up at this temp, 300°C is relatively tame
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