Editor’s message: Communication applications and perception of microwave effect

Abstract

According to publications on microwave conferences and journals, the interest in the field of not communication applications covers a wide range of topics, such as agriculture, biomedical, chemistry, dielectric properties, drying, energy, food, industrial and scale-up, modelling, ovens design, plasma, and solid state, among many others. Non-thermal microwave effect is still a controversial issue, at least in terms of its justification, although there are many well supported reports of higher rate reactions with microwaves compared to conventional heating. Activation of different reaction mechanisms, and either volumetric or selective heating, more energy into the system, could provide an explanation to this observed effect. The two-step sintering process where temperature is increased above the sintering set point for a short time could be a sort of example of thermal issues involved. Therefore, it is essential for non-thermal studies to accurately know the temperature profile in the sample, which often is difficult, so that values are calculated, or estimated, though modelling. Despite this inconvenience, there are reports with results that seriously challenges thermal explanations, and that is why this field of microwave research is active. However, some words regarding microwave effect have been taken, mostly in the internet and social networking, for claiming that microwaves are cause of illness, alter nutritional meal values, and have other effects against healthy life, including infertility. Even earlier than these generalized claims, safety has been an issue, regardless their impossibility due to nature of microwave energy being not energetical enough to break chemical bonding, and thermal regulation of mammals, to produce such consequences. These topics have been studied as they have arisen, quite before the commercial internet and, of course, internet social networking, which penetration power made almost any subject interesting to a wide audience. Regarding experiments to proof the effect of microwaves, there are some, even presented in fair science projects that although well prepared, have a scientific rigor accordingly to the student’s level. For instance, there is an experiment where plants were watered with water that was previously heated with microwaves and then left to cool down, against running water watering, with the comparation of the appearance of only two plants, they made conclusions about microwave effect. For public interest, this becomes a matter of perception rather than science, social networks offer the chance to cast conclusions directly, without any proof, leading understanding to the general knowledge and common sense of the readers. Table 1 shows a roughly ranking of the number of pdf documents found in internet from a google search combining different words about the subject. The number changes each time that the search is conducted, but they are within the same range and ranking remains the same. Counting of documents cannot be taken as a measurement of interest directly, because their availability depends of factors related to popularity and accessibility. Despite this