Technical Papers and Presentations

Industrial microwave heating simulations often require the representation of large cavities, multiple feeding ports, distributed food loads, and supporting structures. In the present work, a full-scale electromagnetic model was required because preliminary analyses showed that a reduced single-module representation could not reproduce the behavior of the complete tunnel through physically consistent boundary conditions. The main challenge was the geometrical complexity of the food load. The reference configuration included 960 individual slices arranged on a support layer. Modeling each slice explicitly would have introduced a large number of domains and interfaces, leading to excessive meshing effort and computational cost. To address this, a material field approach was implemented: the discrete load geometry was replaced by a single thin domain in which the complex relative permittivity was defined as a spatially varying function. Product regions were assigned food dielectric properties, while air gaps were represented by a permittivity equal to one. A mesh tolerance of few millimeters was adopted as a compromise between load reconstruction accuracy and computational feasibility. The model enabled the evaluation of electric field distribution, dissipated power, load uniformity, and coupling efficiency, providing a scalable strategy for complex industrial microwave heating analyses.