Modelling microwave heating

Abstract

Although microwave radiation is best known for heating food in the kitchen, in recent years it has found new applications in many industrial processes, such as those involving melting, smelting, sintering, drying, and joining. Heating by microwave radiation constitutes a highly coupled nonlinear problem giving rise to new and unexpected physical behavior, the best known of which is the appearance of "hot spots." That is, in many industrial applications of microwave heating it has been observed that heating does not take place uniformly but rather regions of very high temperature tend to form. In order to predict the occurrence of such phenomena it is necessary to develop simplified mathemati..