A preliminary study on numerical simulation of microwave heating process for chemical reaction and discussion of hotspot and thermal runaway phenomenon

Abstract

The nonlinear process of microwave heating chemical reaction is studied by means of numerical simulation. Especially, the variation of temperature in terms of space and time, as well as the hotspot and thermal runaway phenomena are discussed. Suppose the heated object is a cylinder and the incident electromagnetic (EM) wave is plane wave, the problem turns out to be a coupling calculation of 2D multi-physical fields. The integral equation of EM field is solved using the method of moment (MoM) and the thermal conduction equation is solved using a semi-analysis method. Moreover, a method to determine the equivalent complex permittivity of reactant under the heating is presented in order to perform the calculation. The numerical results for water and a dummy chemical reaction (A) show that the hotspot is a ubiquitous phenomenon in microwave heating process. When the radius of the heated object is small, the highest temperature occurs somewhere inside the object due to the concentration of the EM wave. While the radius increases to a certain degree, the highest temperature occurs somewhere close to the surface due to the skin effect, and the whole high temperature area shows crescent-shaped. That is in accordance with basic physical principles. If the radius is kept the same in the heating process, the hotspot position of water does not change, while that of reaction A with several radius values varies. For either water or A, the thermal runaway phenomenon in which small difference of radius results in large difference of highest temperature, occurs easily when the radius is small. On the contrary, it is not evident when the radius is large. Moreover, it is notable that the highest temperature in water shows oscillating decreasing trend with the increase of radius, but in reaction A almost decreases monotonously. Further study should be performed to determine if this difference is only an occasional occurrence.