Solid-state RF energy set to improve cooking, lighting…
RF energy is on the cusp of bringing changes to cooking, lighting, industrial heating, automotive spark plugs, and a host of other applications. It’s made possible through the development of RF transistors that can provide sufficient power at the right frequencies, namely the 2.45 GHz ISM band. Yes, the same band used by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
As with any new technology, RF energy applications come with engineering challenges such as thermal dissipation, cost, size, and measurement. At EDICON 2016 in Boston, I met with Klaus Werner, Executive Director of the RF Energy Alliance, who also gave a presentation that day. After the conference, I spoke with Mark Murphy, Senior Director Marketing and Business Development for RF Power at MACOM and with Robin Wesson, Advanced Applications Architect at Ampleon.
“RF energy could change the way we cook food,” said Werner, “but it’s being used in other applications.” He explained that RF energy, generated by RF transistors in power amplifiers, could replace the magnetrons in microwave ovens. By generating energy with semiconductors and more than one antenna (Figure 1), microwave ovens could produce energy sufficient for cooking and adapt to changing conditions as food cooks. That can result in more even cooking than we currently get from our microwave ovens, which essentially operate as on/off, open-loop systems. Instead, the next generation of microwave ovens will have complete closed-loop control. Some of today’s ovens have mode-stirrers or turntables to attempt to produce a uniform field inside the cavity while others use humidity sensors that provide some feedback, but not enough, for the kind of control needed.
Figure 2 shows a block diagram of a microwave oven that uses solid-state amplifiers instead of a magnetron. RF signals are generated by oscillators and can be mixed to provide modulation as well as make adjustments to the output’s amplitude, frequency, or phase. An RF switch applies the signal to a high-power amplifier (HPA). To be practical, a microwave oven will need at least two energy sources to produce sufficient heating.
As with any closed-loop system, this design requires feedback, and that means measurement. Although today’s microwave ovens may use moisture sensors to provide some feedback, that’s an indirect measurement. Solid-state microwave ovens can get a measurement on the load itself.
“As food cooks,” said Murphy, “it absorbs less and less energy. That means more and more energy is reflected back into the cavity.” The key to the feedback system lies in measuring the properties of food as it cooks. That causes changes in the cavity’s behavior at some frequencies. Thus, the system needs to measure the energy reflected from the food. Wesson’s paper, RF Solid State Cooking, provides data showing how reflected energy, and hence return loss, changes as food cooks.
With return-loss (S11) measurements from the couplers, the control system can adjust the RF heating signal’s amplitude, frequency (between 2.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz), and phase (to any angle). The system can make adjustments for each antenna, thus altering the energy field in different parts of the cavity. While it’s possible to adjust signal phase to any angle, the effects of phase and how to best use them are still under investigation.
RF power amplifiers should provide better consistency from oven-to-oven and from one cooking to the next. Today’s magnetron-based ovens are notorious for creating different RF environments depending on the load, with no way to compensate.
The ability to change the frequency, power level, and phase of the RF heating signal means that ovens should be able to spread the power over the optimum settings for each type of food. Eventually, different types of food will have unique cooking profiles. Users should be able to find the settings that work best and store them for future use.
Over time, microwave ovens may even be able to use beamforming—a concept borrowed from wireless communications—to direct energy where it’s needed most. Thus, having a uniform energy field in the cavity might not be optimal. Even now, proof-of concept microwave cooking has, according to Murphy, demonstrated the ability to cook a hot dog while not melting a scoop of ice cream placed inside the cavity at the same time. MACOM has demonstrated RF cooking, which you can see in this video. NXP has demonstrated how RF energy can be used to a cook a fish in a block of ice.
Four-port directional RF couplers, shown in the Figure 2 diagram and in Figure 3, provide low-power samples of the forward and reflected energy. “The measurement circuit is essentially a vector-network analyzer (VNA),” said Murphy. The forward and reflected power from the coupler feeds an A/D converter. The digital output goes to a microcontroller that implements the control loop. “At this point,” said Wesson, “it’s still unclear if the industry will opt to use phase information, but instead may rely on amplitude only.”
“At Ampleon,” he continued, “we feel that having phase information is important for cooking. In the forward direction, phase control does nothing in single-channel applications but adds a new dimension of field pattern variation in multi-channel applications. More field-affecting variables means better control.”
The ability to measure reflected RF energy and provide tight closed-loop control over cooking should reduce the likelihood of burning popcorn and with it, the possibility of fire.
This article was first published by EDN and EE Times.
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