A Finite Element and Finite Difference Formulation for Microwave Heating Laminar Materia

A numerical model is presented for predicting the temperature distributions in microwave heating processes with varying 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 fi4rther 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 calculate the electric field distribution. A comparison between numerical results and measured temperature distributions was obtained employing thermal imaging techniques.