Modification of a household microwave oven for continuous temperature and weight measurements during drying of foods

The main objective of this study was to modify a conventional household microwave oven for recording temperature and weight measurements continuously during microwave drying of foods. A household microwave oven with digital control was equipped with an electronic balance and a set of standard thermocouples that were connected to a PC for continuous data collection. The efficiency of the modified thermocouples was tested against the built-in probe of the oven. It was found that this microwave oven dryer set-up could be used for drying kinetics studies of foods since both the temperature and weight of the sample could be recorded continuously during the microwave drying operation.