Principles of Microwave Combination Heating

Faster, automated cooking of foods with improved quality can be realistically achieved only by a combination of heating modes such as microwave, infrared, and hot air, which, by themselves, have limitations. Combining heating modes poses many technical challenges. To meet these challenges, comprehensive understanding of microwave combination heating is needed. This article is the synthesis of the most fundamental-based approaches (theoretical and experimental) in an attempt to provide the most succinctly said principles that can be useful to a product or process designer in a very practical sense. To obtain these principles, characteristics of various individual modes of heating are discussed and principles of combining them are deduced based on the behavior of the individual modes.