**Author details**

Mohamed S. Shaheen, Khaled F. El–Massry\* and Ahmed H. El–Ghorab *Flavour and Aroma Department, National Research Center, Egypt* 

Faqir M. Anjum *National Science& Technology (NIFSAT), Agriculture University, Faisalabad, Pakistan* 

<sup>\*</sup> Corresponding Author

#### **14. References**

14 The Development and Application of Microwave Heating

could replace conventional ovens. Unfortunately, in industry the distribution of microwave processes is still far away from such high numbers. Only a relatively low number of microwave applications can be found in actual industrial production, compared with their indisputable high potential. These successful microwave applications range over a great spectrum of all thermal food processes. The most prominent advantages of microwave heating are the reachable acceleration and time savings and the possible volume instead of surface heating. Reasons mentioned for the failure of industrial microwave applications range from high energy costs, which have to be counterbalanced by higher product qualities, over the conservatism of the food industry and relatively low research budgets, to the lack of microwave engineering knowledge and of complete microwave heating models and their calculation facilities. The latter disadvantage has been partly overcome by the exponentially growing calculating power which makes it possible to compute more and more realistic models by numerical methods. Very important for the task of realistic calculations is the determination of dielectric properties of food substances by experiments and theoretical approaches. Nevertheless in order to estimate results of microwave heating applications and to check roughly the numerical results, knowledge of simple solutions of the one-dimensional wave propagation like the exponentially damped wave is of practical (and also educational) relevance. But still the best test for numerical calculations is experiments, which yield the real temperature distributions within the product, which is really important especially in pasteurization and sterilization applications. While more conventional temperature probe systems, like fibre optic probes, liquid crystal foils or infrared photographs only give a kind of incomplete information about the temperature distribution within the whole sample, probably magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to give very useful information about the heating patterns. Hopefully, this together with the enormous calculation and modeling power will give the microwave technique an

additional boost to become more widespread in industrial food production.

*National Science& Technology (NIFSAT), Agriculture University, Faisalabad, Pakistan* 

exhausted.

**Author details** 

Faqir M. Anjum

Corresponding Author

 \*

Mohamed S. Shaheen, Khaled F. El–Massry\*

*Flavour and Aroma Department, National Research Center, Egypt* 

The breakthrough of microwave technology in the food industry due to its high potential has been predicted many times before, but it has been delayed every time up to now. That is why we are cautious in predicting the future of microwaves in industrial use. However, we think that the potential of microwave technology in the food industry is far from being

and Ahmed H. El–Ghorab


http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index4.html.
