Question

Why does a heating element get hot upon passing current through it? ...?

Answer 1

In school we learn that some materials carry electricity well, others badly. The good carriers of electricity are called conductors, while the poor carriers are known as insulators. Conductors and insulators are often better described by talking about how much resistance they put up when an electric current flows through them. So conductors have a low resistance (electricity flows through them easily) while insulators have a much higher resistance (it's a real struggle for the electricity to get through). In an electric or electronic circuit, we can use devices called resistors to control how much current flows; using a dial to increase the resistance and lower the current in a loudspeaker circuit is a way of turning down the volume, for example. Resistors work by converting electrical energy to heat energy; in other words, they get hot when heat flows through them. But it's not just resistors that do this. Even a thin piece of wire will get hot if you force enough electricity through it. That's the basic idea behind incandescent lamps (old-fashioned, bulb-shaped lamps). Inside the glass bulb, there's a very thin coil of wire called a filament. When enough electricity flows through it, it glows white hot—so it's really making light by making heat. Around 95 percent or so of the energy a lamp like this uses is turned into heat and completely wasted (using an energy-saving fluorescent lamp is far more efficient, because most of the electricity the lamp consumes is converted into light with hardly any wasted heat).

Answer 2

Heating element got hot upon passing current through it because basically in a conductor, there is no need for ionization in order to have moving charges because of the atom share the electrons
And heating material tend to use the material with higher resistivity


hope this helps