think of microwave wattage as our MHz/GHz. moar power = faster nuking
What you could do is make a microwave that worked at a lower frequency. More power would be delivered to the food because free-space path loss is reduced at lower frequencies.
Microwaves and Urban Myths
- Thread starter TrixiBuG
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What you could do is make a microwave that worked at a lower frequency. More power would be delivered to the food because free-space path loss is reduced at lower frequencies.
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I actually worked with someone who wouldnt use a microwave because of this. Hello Physics 101.
You'll probably come back with, actually it would need to be milliwave or something
The micro prefix just means that the wavelength is small. There's no technical reason for the name, obviously someone just thought that it sounded good. The microwave band is usually defined as going from 300 MHz to 300 GHz. Any higher than that and you're into the infrared part of the spectrum.
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I pushed my microwave to 5.5ghz on air.
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It is radiation but there again so is visible light. Microwaves have a wavelength of centimeters, gamma rays have wavelengths of picometers.
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I think some work at 915 MHz. Big industrial units. However free space path loss over not-a-lot-of-distance is not going to be a terribly large amount and the resonators in the magnetron would need to be bigger and probably heavier. Need moar powar.
Yep. All valid points. The easiest way is just to pump more power into the thing.
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This is always the solution. Nobody ever complained about having too much gain*.
* Probably not true, oscillation is a beach but it sounds good.
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Water resonates at the frequencies involved, so it absorbs the energy willfully and with speed, thus cooking water rich items works well in a microwave oven.
If not for the co-incidence then microwave ovens would be much less useful.
As for cooking with the door open, and damage etc, as long as the internal shield grill is correctly placed then it should stop any dangerous wavelengths escaping.
I believe original models often didn't have such grills, fifty years ago, and thus could have been dangerous.
Now they shouldn't be, as long as the unit is intact.
If not for the co-incidence then microwave ovens would be much less useful.
As for cooking with the door open, and damage etc, as long as the internal shield grill is correctly placed then it should stop any dangerous wavelengths escaping.
I believe original models often didn't have such grills, fifty years ago, and thus could have been dangerous.
Now they shouldn't be, as long as the unit is intact.
Probably a price thing - all commercial microwaves are much higher than domestic. Infact if you open a commercial microwave up, you can see its basically two domestic microwaves in one
They have two of everything in there 
Probably a price thing - all commercial microwaves are much higher than domestic. Infact if you open a commercial microwave up, you can see its basically two domestic microwaves in one
Also, there's little or no gain when nuking from frozen and that's an important part of the market. There's a couple of 1.8KW microwaves in the staff room at work and frozen ready meals are handy for lunch some days. I've found that it's easier and no slower to use an 800W one instead. You can't just scale down the time - a 1.8KW microwave will boil the outside with the inside still frozen.
We had a whacking great big Toshiba 1000w machine from the 90's, it only gave up the ghost a few years back, never found anything that stacks up to it since, the new ones seem like toys compared to that behemoth, you could fit a modern microwave oven inside that big old hulking brute.
I miss that damned thing.
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There is no such thing as visible light. Light is invisible by nature.
The idea that water resonates at this frequency is a common misconception. What actually happens is a process called dielectric heating. Polar molecules have an electric dipole moment and align themselves with the electric field. RF is just high frequency AC, so as the electric field oscillates these polar molecules rotate back and forth to keep in line with the field. Some other things in foods, such as fats and sugars, contain polar molecules as well. These are less polar than water molecules but are still subject to the same effect, albeit to a lesser extent.
Yeah, we've got a late 70s / early 80s Japanese thing that takes up half the worktop. It's ace.
The only thing my Microwave can cook properly is Porridge, anything else I've ever tried in it either explodes everywhere or doesn't cook so I keep putting it back in for longer until it too explodes everywhere, when my kettle died it even managed to fool me into thinking it had let me boil a mug of water to make coffee, all was good until I added the sugar and the crafty thing had put a delayed explosion in the mug somehow. Microwaves, don't trust them.