Lightweight structures made from fiber-reinforced thermoplastic semifinished parts gain more and more importance in the automotive and the aviation industry due to their excellent mechanical properties, their ability for functional integration, their low specific mass und their recyclability. Prior to forming, the sheets must be heated to soften the polymeric matrix material. This is mostly achieved via infrared radiation, convection or contact heating. Infrared heating is by far the most prominent method. A pilot experimental heating station was constructed to investigate this topic. It is equipped with ceramic heating elements for one-sided heating and it is designed to examine the behavior of heating methods and their influencing factors. Those include the temperature of the ceramic heaters, the distance from the heaters to the semifinished part and the number of heaters and their power. A simple clamping frame is used to hold the parts in place while four thermocouples on the top and the bottom of the sheets are included to monitor the temperature development. The experiments are conducted using twill-woven glass fibre reinforced polyamide 6.6 and polypropylene matrix systems of 0.5, 1 and 2 mm thickness. The measurements deliver sufficient data to enable the modeling of the heating behavior, especially the heat conduction through the thickness of the sheets. It can be shown that the heating behavior of thermoplastic composites is highly dependent on the used material and the experimental setup. In general, the surface that faced the heater exhibited a larger temperature distribution than the opposite side, which is an indicator for a high lateral thermal conductivity. The temperature difference between the heated and the opposite side had the tendency to be higher for PA 6.6 matrix systems in comparison with PP of equal thickness.