AN EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE MICROWAVE-HEATING OF WOOD

Research in wood heating and drying over the last few years has focuse d on the potential application of using microwave and radio-frequency energy in conjunction with conventional drying operations. Unfortunate ly, due to the complexity of the problem it is very difficult to inves tigate the evolution of the electromagnetic fields in a general microw ave heating applicator using either experimental or analytical methods . In this paper, a previously developed mathematical model based upon a finite-volume time-domain (FVTD) formulation has been extended to en able the heating of an anisotropic material, such as wood, to be simul ated in an arbitrarily shaped applicator. This comprehensive three-dim ensional model will be validated against an extensive set of experimen tal results and used subsequently to investigate numerous aspects of t he microwave heating of wood in a small scale industrial waveguide app licator. The agreement between the experimental and numerical simulati on results highlights that the model can predict the microwave heating phenomena for an anisotropic material very accurately.