A flexible and transparent thin film heater based on a carbon fiber /heat-resistant cellulose composite

Abstract The thin flexible film heater made of carbon fibers is widely considered to be an ideal material for the use as self-heating devices because of its safe, low-cost, no noises, small size and fast heating as well as energy saving. Presently thin flexible film heater is mostly fabricated by mixing method using the long cellulose fibers as film-forming materials and carbon fibers as self-heating materials, which mostly suffer from opaque or uneven heating field. In this work, we firstly reported a flexible and transparent thin film heater (FTFH) composed of carbon fibers and regenerated cellulose. The use of regenerated cellulose for membrane materials brings high transmittance, strong adhesion, fast temperature response and high generated temperature. More importantly, the FTFH using novel carbon fibers as self-heating materials and regenerated cellulose as membrane materials show a rapid heating response (12 s), higher power density (2577 w/m2) and long-term stability of generated temperature (162.3 °C).