I heard on a news report that there is a paint that will generate heat from a 12-volt battery. What can you tell me about this subject? — JF
Generating heat from a battery is relatively easy. All you need is a material that conducts electricity only moderately well and you’re in business. If you allow current to flow through that material from the battery’s positive terminal to its negative terminal, the current will lose energy as it struggles to get through the material and the current’s lost energy will become thermal energy in the material. The only difficult part of this task is in choosing the right material so that it doesn’t produce too much or too little heat. In short, the electric resistance of the finished material has to be in the right range. For a solid system that you can cut and tailor, that’s not much of a problem. But for a paint, it could be tricky. To make an inexpensive paint, it would probably need to use carbon powder as the electric conductor. A thin layer of carbon granules held in place by a plastic of some sort would probably provide a suitable conducting surface that would become warm when you allowed current to flow through it from a battery. There are copper and silver conducting paints that might also work, but these are rather expensive and I’m not sure how they behave at elevated temperatures.