A Development of Microwave Oven for Eradicating Eggs of Red Flour Beetles

摘要

Eggs of pests embedded in rice grains could be eradicated using a general domestic microwave oven operating at 2.45 GHz. Since the cooking chamber of a general microwave oven is small, it could not heat a lot of rice grains at once. It is therefore hard to make use of general domestic microwave oven in a small rice mill which produces a lot of rice grains every day. This paper presents a development of a microwave oven which is designed to use in a small rice mill to eradicate eggs of red flour beetles embedded in Thai Jasmine rice. Cooking chamber is designed to cope with rice grains having weight of 5 kilograms. From the experiment results, it is found that the designed microwave oven could effectively eradicate eggs of red flour beetles in 5 kg rice grains at 15 minutes heating time.