Contribution to the multi-physics study of porous media heated intermittently by RF energy in a coaxial cell

• Main Author: Wu, Li
• Format: Others
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/15667/1/WU_Li.pdf

With the rapid growth of economic and population explosion, the demands for porous media such as foods, woods and bricks enlarge so wildly that their trades are busy around the world. To be stored, transported and utilized better, dehydration of porous media is necessary since drying is one of the most important and stable methods for preserving materials. After World War two, possible RF heating in many domains was suggested. Even though a lot of novel heating technologies have become extremely commercially important and been widely used, RF heating is preferred to the other heating means for several significant reasons: 1) it is rapid and requires less time to come up to the desired process temperature; 2) radio frequency heating may be relatively spatially more uniform than conventional heating; 3) radio frequency heating systems can be turned on or off instantly; 4) it is better for large, thick food; 5) it requires lower investment costs, and so on. However, little information on radio frequency heating for commercial drying of porous media is available in the published literature. Therefore, it will be interesting to research the interaction between RF and porous media. This thesis, to improve the use ratio of RF energy further, proposed a coaxial cell to research RF cycling heating potato with different phases: solid, liquid and gas. The mechanism of mass and heat transport in the porous media without RF energy was studied first by solving the governing equations of 1D brick model with Matlab codes. The calculated results compared qualitatively with those in the reference paper. Based on that model, an axisymmetric 2D model with periodically RF heating potato was built and simulated. Landau and Lifshitz, Looyenga equation was employed to predict the effective permittivity change in the simulation since it is difficult to get the accurate measurement data of porous media. The salinity of heated sample- a very important parameter of the mixing rule-was estimated. The effects of different process period, variation of height of sample and power on the temperature distributions were studied and analyzed. Corresponding experiments were also conducted to measure the temperature change during the heating process. All the simulated results compared qualitatively with the measured ones. Sensitivity analysis was also done and some suggestions on the improvement of heating effect were concluded. Based on the suggestions, a new RF heating model was proposed to overcome the drawbacks of our previous model.