Optimizing Heater Electrode and Temperature Distributions On Large Scale Sheet Metal Heaters

We present a method to design specific heater electrode distributions on substrates with high thermal conductivity such as sheet metal. The substrate is covered with a thin polymer insulation layer on both sides, which are, in turn, carrying screen printed, electrically conductive heater electrodes and another protective polymer layer. The temperature inside a predetermined optimization area is demanded to be as uniform as possible, which is required for various high-precision heating applications. A uniform temperature distribution is required when realizing a newly proposed "lab on metal" approach. For this purpose, an optimization algorithm yields the required distances between the electrodes. The resulting electrode distribution was numerically obtained for certain optimization areas. We show the electrode positions relative to the distance from the centermost electrode and the optimization error for each distribution. Finally we describe the fabrication of a test device and show infrared measurements of the FEM modeled uniform temperature distribution on the experimental realized device.