One of the main problems regarding the efficiency in a heating industrial system using high power microwaves is related with the uncontrolled changes on the load. These changes can be caused both by the different kinds of materials to be processed in the same oven and by the temperature rise which modifies the material's physical properties, particularly its dielectric permittivity. Usually, the microwave generator is matched to the antenna feeding the oven by means of a waveguide matching system, typically a two, three or four capacitive-screw tuner empirically adjusted for a given load. Once the heating process is started, the temperature dependence of the complex permittivity usually changes the impedance seen by the generator, worsening the mismatch factor and reducing the efficiency of the heating process. A similar process happens when the load is inhomogeneous or discontinuous; it is not feasible to manually re-adjust the matching network for every different sample processed. Until now the solution has been simple but highly inefficient: to increase the incident power in order to overcome the mismatching effects.

Peer Reviewed