A finite element and finite difference formulation for microwave heating laminar material

摘要

A numerical model is presented for predicting the tempera- ture distributions in microwave heating processes with vary- ing dielectric and thermo-physical properties. The non-linear partial differential equation for the temperature field with a microwave power source is solved numerically by means of a hybrid method, employing both the finite-element technique in the space domain and the finite-difference technique in the time domain. The method is simplified further by considering a two dimensional formulation. Moreover, a real microwave laminar material heating process with known dielectric and- thermo-physical properties in a multimode cavity has been simulated, using modal analysis and perturbational method to calculated the electric field distribution. A comparison between numerical results and measured temperature distri- butions was obtained employing thermal imaging techniques.