A comparison of the microwave oven and reverberation chamber

Abstract

The reverberation chamber is a facility mainly for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) tests whilst the microwave oven is used for heating applications. They both generate a time-averaged uniform field in the area of interest. In this paper, these two facilities are compared in terms of their applications, operation principles, design philosophy and especially the field uniformity with the aid of electromagnetic simulation techniques, where a dyadic Green's function is employed. It is revealed that a well-designed reverberation chamber can outperform a conventional microwave oven in terms of the field uniformity. A modified microwave oven design is suggested accordingly.