Bonus question Tutorial 9

SRI HARSHA K EE12B031 DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING IIT MADRAS April 19, 2014

Question:
Estimate the time it takes to cook a potato in a microwave oven. Assume that the oven is irradiated by a plane wave in top half of a window on one side of the oven. Find all necessary values (size and power of microwave oven, size and heat capacity of potato, etc) and then a) Estimate the power in each mode of the oven b) Integrate the energy density over the volume of the potato, for each mode c) Estimate the change in temperature of the potato per unit time and subsequently the time to cook it.

Solution:
Assumptions : For a typical microwave oven, we shall assume the following details: Dimensions of microwave oven : Cuboidal with 0.40.30.3 m3. Let us orient our longitudinal axis along the length (the side with dimension 0.4 m and our transverse plane as the plane parallel to the plane containing the breadth and the height (0.3 0.3 m2). Dimensions of potato: Cubical potato of dimensions 0.050.050.05 m3. Specic Heat Capacity of water: 4.187 KJ/(Kg K) Water Content in Potato : 80 % Potatos initial temperature considered: 30C We shall assume that the potato gets heated upto 70 C Mass of Potato : 100 grams (0.1 Kg) Exciting frequency in the microwave oven: 2.45 GHz. (resonant frequency of water). (We shall allow a bandwidth of about 0.05GHz because the frequencies practically wont be exactly at the resonant frequency but would be band containing it (preferably centred around it)). Let the input electric eld corresponding to the input EM wave have a magnitude |E|. Let us assume that the input power has been obtained from a wattage of 800 W. Power density of the input wave is . Therefore, . Solving, we get |E| = 2.588 KV/m.

Let us assume that the input eld gets redistributed due to reections from the walls of the cavity resonator that the microwave oven functions as and gets distributed into dierent modes (each mode is identied by its m,n,p ) and the energy is thus split up into these modes. (Basically amnp and bmnp represent the coecients (magnitudes) of the modes (corresponding to that particular m,n,p ) transverse electric elds components along the two transverse axes (x and y) and this is also the total electric eld as we are assuming TE mode. We now determine what all modes can be present in the oven for the given statistical data. Let us allow a bandwidth around the operating frequency (about 0.05GHz) or so. We know that 2=(m/a)2+(n/b)2+(p/d)2 . Here, a = b = 0.3m and d = 0.4m. We know have the inequality as follows: . (Where m,n,p are integers and p cannot be equal to 0). Solving, we get the following possible modes: (m,n,p) (3,1,5),(1,3,5). We now have to determine the coecients amnp and bmnp for each of these 2 modes and our job is done. Before going to that, we make an important assumption: The input electric eld can be approximately thought of as part of some wave and thus have a phase variation linearly related with (the longitudinal axis) Therefore, (without loss of generality, I am assuming the input is there completely along one of the axes in the transverse plane(for simplicty in the forthcoming inner product calculations that will be used to determine the spatial fourier coecients). [Note: ( |E| = Eo)] That is, we have the electric elds for the two modes existing as follows: Mode (3, 1, 5):

Mode (1, 3, 5):

We now have to determine a315. We do this by taking the dot product of E Let us assume that we integrate at a particular z and this will just give out a constant term. (I would choose my z to around the middle of the length so that it is nearby the potatos position). Let us make a convenient choice of z = 0.2.

Modal Power Analysis:

Power in mode (3,1,5) : P(m,n,p)=3,1,5 = 2593.374901W/m2 Power in mode (1 , 3,5):

P(m,n,p)=3,1,5 = 382.23889W/m2 We now integrate the energy density over the volume of the potato. To simplify our process of calculating hard integrals (volume), we shall make an approximation of using the average energy per time by taking the derivative of the energy density of electric fields volume integral. Average Energy per unit time is being calculate (so that we can consider it as average power and then calculate the required time by using Required Energy=Average PowerTime for heating up. If the wave has a frequency f , then the instantaneous power would have frequency 2f and there we have 2 multiplied (actually division as far as time is concerned to get the average energy). from mode 1 ,

P3,1,5potato = 21.6689J/s from mode 2 ,

P1,3,5potato = 7.1355J/s Total power supplied to potato Ptotal = 28.8044J/s Let us assume that the time taken to heat the potato is t seconds. The amount of heat taken up for the potato (heat calculations) is as follows: Q = mCwater(T) where Cwater =4.187 KJ/(Kg K) and m = 0.1 Kg. But only 80% of the mass is water. Therefore, we need to consider 0.08 Kg for m. (T)1 = 40C (=(70 30)C). Evaluating thus, we get Q =13398.4 J. Let us assume that we have an efficiency of 85% in heating the potato through the EM Wave radiations. Therefore, we get that time=547.23s = 9 minutes 7 seconds