Phase-Controlled Zoned Microwave Heating in a Dual-Port Solid-State-Driven Cavity System

Abstract

Traditional microwave heating systems generally suffer from limited spatial controllability, making selective heating of different regions inside a resonant cavity difficult. To address this limitation, a dual-port solid-state microwave heating system based on phase-controlled phased-array technology for zoned microwave heating is proposed. A pair of inverted-F antennas was employed to generate controllable electromagnetic field distributions by adjusting the phase difference between the two excitation ports. An electromagnetic simulation model was established to investigate the phase-dependent field distribution, followed by thermal simulations and experimental validation using water loads under different loading conditions. Both the simulation and experimental results demonstrated that varying the phase difference effectively redistributed the microwave energy within the cavity, enabling multiple zoned-heating modes and directional heating with good agreement between the simulation and measurements. The proposed architecture provides an effective and relatively low-complexity solution for controllable microwave zoned heating and offers a practical approach for future intelligent microwave heating systems.