A near infrared (NIR) heating system has advantages over the conventional convection-based systems, in terms of heating uniformity and energy efficiency. When it is over-heated during its operation, the radiation lamp gets blackened, and the life of the radiation module becomes severely limited. The heat transfer system in the module is based on a high operating-temperature, and the radiation makes it difficult to analyze in detail the reliability issue, with an experimental approach alone. We developed a numerical heat-transfer model of the NIR heating system. We applied a ray-tracing method on the radiative heat transport, and a finite volume method on the conductive and convective systems, respectively. The cooling performance of the system is presented, based on the energy and flow distributions in the module. The factors that directly affect the module life are analyzed, such as the surface temperatures of the lamp glass and the reflector, and design improvements are discussed.