Manufacturing food, chemicals, cement, and steel requires heat, and lots of it. Nearly all of this heat today comes from burning fossil fuels. Industrial heating contributes about 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Using clean electricity to produce industrial heat could make a big dent in those emissions. And researchers at Rice University have now made the transition more feasible. Using tiny threads of carbon fire, they show how many manufacturing processes could be electrified..
Decarbonizing industrial heat is possible today using bioenergy, hydrogen, solar thermal, and geothermal technologies. These cleaner alternatives to burning fossil fuels can provide low- and medium- temperature heat below 400°C, which together make up about half of all industrial heat demand.
But manufacturing processes such as melting, drying, or metallurgy require much high temperatures in furnaces. There aren’t many efficient options for providing such high temperature heat. “Electrifying industrial heat is one of the most important, and most difficult, pieces of decarbonization,” said Monisha Vijay Kumar, a graduate student in applied physics at Rice University in a press release.
One way to electrify industrial heat is to use coils or meshes made of specialty nickel-and-chrome metal alloys. Through a process called Joule heating, the internal resistance of these alloys leads to heat production when electricity passes through them.
In a new study published in the journal Small, the Rice team show that wires and fabrics made from carbon nanotube fibers (CNTF) could be much better materials for such Joule heating. Carbon nanotubes are tiny cylinders made from rolled-up single-atom-thick sheets of carbon. They are thousands of times thinner than a human hair, and are extremely strong, and are excellent conductors of electricity and heat.
Wires and fabrics made from CNTFs deliver significantly more heating power per unit mass than conventional metal-alloy heaters when placed in industrial gas streams, the researchers show. The carbon-based materials also handle the harsh environment better. In nonoxidizing environments, they can handle far higher temperatures without degrading and failing. And they delivered more even heating with fewer hot spot formations.
Another advantage of CNTF yarns is that they can be woven, knitted and formed into lightweight, high-surface area structures, making them easier to integrate into various industrial settings.
“Textile techniques give us extraordinary freedom in creating three-dimensional architectures,” said mechanical engineering professor Vanessa Sanchez. “We can design heaters that are lightweight, porous and mechanically compliant while remaining electrically functional.”
Source: Monisha Vijay Kumar, Anoop Rajappan, Marquise D. Bell et al. High Specific Power Loading of Carbon Nanotube Fiber Devices for Gas Heating. Small, 2026.
Photo by yasin hemmati on Unsplash
