Electric heating is the main method of exploiting oil shale and electric heater is the key part of the heating element. In this paper, the temperature distribution of the electric heater was simulated by the Partial Differential Equation (PDE) of MATLAB, and orthogonal experiment analysis was also carried out to investigate the effects of different factors on the temperature distribution of the heater. The results showed that materials with low density were helpful to improve heating efficiency, and heat production, density and heat capacity had a great effect on the temperature distribution of the heater. The temperature distribution of the heater increased significantly with increasing heat production and radius of the heater, while higher heat capacity always led to the lower overall temperature of the heater. In addition, axisymmetric U-tube and vacuum heating tube were chosen as the heater, being of optimized shape, while copper and stainless steel were determined to be the optimized heater materials.