Thermodynamics model based temperature tracking control in microwave heating

Microwave heating technology has been widely used in both domestic and industrial applications. Temperature control technique is significant in improving the performance of microwave heating. A generalized numerical thermodynamics model associating with the temperature-dependent thermal and physical properties of material for the microwave heating process is proposed in this paper. Experimental data is applied to estimate the microwave power coefficients. Two controllers, sliding mode controller (SMC) and proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller, are presented as the easily implementable and efficient on-line controllers to track the desired temperature profile while acting on the microwave power and the heated material's temperature. The effectiveness of the proposed thermodynamics numerical model is verified by simulations and experiments, which shows that SMC controller has better dynamic control performance than PID controller.