Category: microwave ovens

Why do microwave ovens cook so rapidly?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why do microwave ovens cook so rapidly?

When you put solid food (a potato, not soup) into a conventional oven, the heat flows slowly into the center of that food. This heat must work its way into the food via thermal conduction, in which adjacent atoms and molecules transfer their motional energies in a long bucket-brigade process. The last part of a potato to become hot is its center. However, in a microwave oven, the microwaves travel well into the solid food and deposit their energy everywhere. The potato cooks throughout at a relatively even rate. The actual amount of heat and energy involved in conventional and microwave cooking is about the same. However, the microwaves can heat the food throughout without having to wait for the slow process of conduction to carry it inward from the food’s surface.

Can microwaves be emitted to travel in one direction?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Can microwaves be emitted to travel in one direction?

Yes. Like all electromagnetic waves, microwaves can be focused and concentrated in a particular direction. That is exactly what microwave dish antennas (e.g., satellite dishes) do. At the transmitter, they focus the microwaves emitted by a smaller antenna so that those microwaves travel as a parallel beam. At the receiver, they focus the parallel beam of microwaves onto a smaller antenna. You can think of the microwaves as very long wavelength light waves, so that anything you can do with light (e.g., focus it, form images with it, or bend it with optical devices), you can also do with microwaves. The only problem is that the optical elements you use for microwaves must be larger, because the microwaves have longer wavelengths.

Why do some microwave ovens not seem to have a metal surface in the cooking area…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why do some microwave ovens not seem to have a metal surface in the cooking area?

The cooking chamber of a microwave oven is always metallic. Even the glass door has a metal grid across it to keep the microwaves inside. This metal chamber may be coated with paint or plastic but it is there nonetheless. Without it, the microwaves would leak out and the oven would be hazardous and inefficient. It would cook objects throughout the kitchen.

How can microwaves heat something? Radio waves don’t warm things very much.

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How can microwaves heat something? Radio waves don’t warm things very much.

The electric field of a microwave flips back and forth at just about the right frequency to have the largest effect on water molecules. The water molecules try to follow the reversing electric field and, in doing so, become hotter and hotter. Radio waves flip too slowly to have very much effect on water. Furthermore, the microwaves in an oven are far more intense than the radio waves that we’re used to have around us so that common radio waves just don’t do very much cooking.

You said an ice cube will not get hot in the microwave because the molecules won…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

You said an ice cube will not get hot in the microwave because the molecules won’t “flip”. If this is so, then why do frozen foods cook in the microwave?

As noted previously, the water molecules in frozen foods are not all bound up perfectly inside ice crystals. As long as there are a few relatively mobile water molecules, even frozen food will eventually absorb enough energy to melt. Once that happens, the food can cook easily. Of course, the melting process is frequently very non-uniform so that food comes out with hot and cold regions. In general, frozen food cooked in a microwave is not very satisfying.

How do metal rods short out the microwaves?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How do metal rods short out the microwaves?

If you arrange a metal rod so that it’s parallel to a microwave’s electric field, the microwave will push electric charges up and down that rod. This moving charge will waste some of the microwave’s energy by creating heat in the rod. But the main effect will be that the rod will reflect or scatter the microwave. The moving charge will emit its own microwave and this new microwave will interfere with the original one.

How does a microwave oven defrost foods? Doesn’t it only work with water, not ic…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does a microwave oven defrost foods? Doesn’t it only work with water, not ice?

In any frozen food, there are some water molecules that are relatively free to turn about. These molecules may be at the surfaces of ice crystals or sitting on the surface of food particles. These water molecules can absorb microwaves and heat. However, the heating is very uneven because as soon as any water crystal absorbs enough heat to melt, the resulting liquid water will begin to absorb microwaves much more strongly. That is why defrosting must be done slowly. Then the microwave deposited heat will have time to flow through the food and melt it uniformly. Otherwise, you can end up with boiling hot spots mixed together with frozen icy spots.

How does the resonant cavity in the magnetron work?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

How does the resonant cavity in the magnetron work?

When it’s active, the magnetron’s cavity has electric charge sloshing back and forth along its tines. The charge moves at a frequency determined by the shape and size of the cavity and these are carefully controlled so that the cavity’s natural resonance frequency is 2.45 gigahertz. To keep the charge sloshing, the magnetron adds negative charge from a hot filament wire located in the center of the cavity. Electrons flowing off of this wire are steered toward the negative tines by a magnetic field. As a result, the charges continue to slosh back and forth indefinitely. A small wire connected inside the magnetron extracts some of the energy in the magnetron and converts it into microwaves outside the magnetron. This wire acts as an antenna. The antenna is located in the pipe that carries the microwaves to the cooking chamber.

I have a friend who refuses to stand in front of the microwave oven in his kitch…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

I have a friend who refuses to stand in front of the microwave oven in his kitchen, because he feels the “nuclear waves” leak and will cause his sperm to deform (and he doesn’t want ugly kids). Is this true? What about car phones? He heard they were bad, too!

Both microwave ovens and car phones emit electromagnetic radiation. But that radiation has relatively long wavelengths (about 12 cm in the case of microwave ovens and about 40 cm in the case of car phones) and is not at all like the electromagnetic waves emitted by nuclear processes. Nuclear electromagnetic radiation, usually called gamma rays, has extremely short wavelengths (less than 0.001 nanometer or about a millionth of the wavelength of visible light). All electromagnetic waves are emitted and absorbed as particles called photons. The energy in a photon is inversely proportional to its wavelength (in vacuum). Gamma rays, with their short wavelengths, have very energetic photons that can do lots of chemical damage to your tissue. But the longer wavelength radiation from microwave ovens and car phones comes as very low energy photons. These photons can’t do chemical damage. The only thing those waves can do is heat things. Microwave ovens are carefully shielded so that they keep most of the microwaves inside. If those waves did emerge, they would simply warm your tissue up. This warming won’t cause genetic damage but it could cook your tissue. There has been recent concern about low frequency electromagnetic fields causing subtle damage to tissue, but these have not be substantiated by scientific research and no physically reasonable scenarios for how such damage could occur have been offered.

I’d heard that if I cook in the microwave oven, there will be a possible formati…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

I’d heard that if I cook in the microwave oven, there will be a possible formation of free radicals. Is it true? If yes, how? — Angela I.

It’s doubtful that microwave cooking forms free radicals in food. The microwaves in a microwave oven cook by exerting torques on the water molecules and gradually increasing the water molecules’ thermal energies through friction-like effects. There is never enough energy present in a single molecule at one time to shatter that molecule and form a free radical. While ultraviolet light, such as that found in sunlight, carries enough energy per photon (particle of light) to split a molecule and form a free radical, microwave radiation carries very little energy per photon. That’s why microwave photons can’t do chemical damage the way ultraviolet photons can. However, even if microwave radiation could form free radicals in food, that wouldn’t necessarily cause you trouble when you eat that food. So much happens to the food before it enters your blood stream that a free radical probably won’t survive. The more harmful free radicals are ones that are actually created inside your body, where they can immediately attack important molecules in your cells.