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Background

So I am working on a project to where I am trying to heat up air within a 2 inch tube, with high air flow. I am using 2 inch tri clamp stainless steel tubes where I basically have a fan on one end and am trying to get an inline heater so that the result is a high flow rate and high temperature (around 400F - 500F).

What I have tried so far

I have had some decent success by buying a cheapo heat gun from Harbor Freight and taking the nickel chromium array out of it, suspending it inside a 2 inch tube. I was able to get to about 400 F but after some time (an hour or so) the element seems to burn out and die. I seem to be so close to being able to achieve this goal but was hoping there is a more reliable method to heat the air without having to replace the element that often. I would like to stay to electric heat sources if possible and it would need to be 120V, below 15A (standard house breakers in a kitchen).

Question

So I am not asking for a particular product, but rather what electric heater types out there might work for my application?

The closest thing I could find was something like this:

enter image description here

(Amazon link)

This one fits inside a 2 inch tri clamp tube but seems it needs to be in a liquid, not just with air flow around it? Would this more than likely just burn up too?

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  • $\begingroup$ Check out heat exchangers $\endgroup$
    – Solar Mike
    Jul 14 '19 at 21:23
  • $\begingroup$ Why not buy a bigger, better hair dryer ( or industrial heat gun which is a fancy hair dryer) and blow it into your stainless tube. $\endgroup$
    – blacksmith37
    Jul 14 '19 at 23:54
  • $\begingroup$ Perhaps an inline pipe heater such as deltat.com/duct_heaters.html $\endgroup$
    – Eric S
    Dec 18 '19 at 21:01
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Induction heat your pipe! Pipe is cheap to replace, and unlikely to burn out in a short time, as it has a rather large cross section.

A white hot pipe insulated on the outside should provide plenty of hot air.

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