Microwave transmission performance of fused silica ceramics in microwave high-temperature heating

Abstract Compared with traditional heating methods, microwave heating is widely used in many industrial heating fields because of its advantages, such as material-selective heating, volumetric heating and high-efficiency heating. However, previous studies have shown that the heating mode depends on the transmission performance of refractory insulation materials. In this study, a commonly used refractory material (fused silica ceramics) for microwave heating was studied, according to the law of electromagnetic wave propagation in a single-layer plate, the power transmission coefficient (PTC) of the material at different thickness, temperature and frequency (915 MHz and 2360 MHz) was calculated and analysed, in order to design the refractory structure which has good microwave transmission performance in the whole microwave heating process. The results show that the transmission performance of fused silica ceramics fluctuates regularly with increasing thickness, and there are several microwave transmission peaks in the PTC patterns, the thicknesses corresponding to the transmission peaks at frequency 2360 MHz are in order 0.033 m, 0.065 m and 0.098 m; as the temperature increases, the position of the transmission peaks will shift to a smaller thickness, the transmission performance of fused silica ceramics decreases slightly with increasing temperature. Comparing the transmission performance of mullite, alumina (Al2O3) and fused silica ceramics, it was found that the fused silica ceramics have excellent transmission properties; especially it is at high temperature. The results of this study can provide guidance for the selection of refractory structure materials and sizes as well as the optimization of heating process parameters in high-temperature microwave heating.