Investigation and modeling of temperature changes in food heated in a flatbed microwave oven

This study investigated the heating characteristics of the domestic flatbed microwave oven by observing the temperature distributions in different foods during processing. A computational model based on the finite element method was also successfully established for predicting the temperature distributions in food by coupling an analysis of the electromagnetic field and heat transfer with a consideration of the rotation of the antenna during heating. Methods for optimizing the simulations to minimize the computational time using a geometric model and the food's dielectric properties were proposed. Finally, the simulations were compared with the experiments, and the RRMSE (relative root mean square error) and MRE (maximum relative error) values (material A of 2.27% and 6.53%, material B of 1.92% and 5.88%) demonstrated that they are in good agreement.