A Finite Difference Thermal Model of a Cylindrical Microwave Heating Applicator Using Locally Conformal Overlapping Grids: Part I-Theoretical Formulation

In this paper, we present a versatile mathematical formulation of a newly developed 3-D locally conformal Finite Difference (FD) thermal algorithm developed specifically for coupled electromagnetic (EM) and heat diffusion simulations utilizing Overlapping Grids (OGFD) in the Cartesian and cylindrical coordinate systems. The motivation for this research arises from an attempt to characterize the dominant thermal transport phenomena typically encountered during the process cycle of a high-power, microwave-assisted material processing system employing a geometrically composite cylindrical multimode heating furnace. The cylindrical FD scheme is only applied to the outer shell of the housing cavity whereas the Cartesian FD scheme is used to advance the temperature elsewhere including top and bottom walls, and most of the inner region of the cavity volume. The temperature dependency of the EM constitutive and thermo-physical parameters of the material being processed is readily accommodated into the OGFD update equations. The time increment, which satisfies the stability constraint of the explicit OGFD time-marching scheme, is derived. In a departure from prior work, the salient features of the proposed algorithm are first, the locally conformal discretization scheme accurately describes the diffusion of heat and second, significant heat-loss mechanisms usually encountered in microwave heating problems at the interfacial boundary temperature nodes have been considered. These include convection and radiation between the surface of the workload and air inside the cavity, heat convection and radiation between the inner cavity walls and interior cavity volume, and free cooling of the outermost cavity walls.