The radiant power of the microwave
CDS member Dr.-Ing. Nicole Vorhauer-Huget from the Institute of Process and Systems Engineering at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and her research group focus on making energy-intensive production processes more efficient and environmentally friendly, significantly reducing the enormous consumption of fossil fuels and the associated CO2 emissions.
“The focus is on saving energy and how fossil fuels can increasingly be replaced by renewable energy sources. To this end, we are scrutinizing processes and looking for ways to intensify them, i.e. to manufacture more products with less energy input per unit of time.”, says Dr.-Ing. Vorhauer-Huget. In collaboration with Dr. Jan Barowski from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alba Diéguez Alonso from the TU Dortmund they want to use microwaves as a environmentally friendly alternative for energy intensive material conversion processes. The warming with microwaves in industrial processes has the advantage, that the heat energy is generated directly in the product as volumetric heating. This process is significantly faster than indirect heating. Furthermore the processes can be controlled better and the CO2 balance is close to zero when electricity generated from wind, water or sun is used for microwave heating.
The project on microwave technology is a subproject of the Collaborative Research Centre / Transregio 287 "BULK REACTION" which is in the second funding period. The German Research Foundation (DFG) funded the Collaborative Research Centre with about 12 million euros.
Together with her colleagues, Dr.-Ing. Vorhauer-Huget is investigating how microwave heating can be made energy-efficient and controllable for processes up to 1,000 ° C. The areas of application and scientific issues are diverse. The development of model-based methods is of great relevance in view of the limited possibilities for measuring temperatures or material conversions in such processes.
Dr.-Ing. Vorhauer-Huget sees "great potential" in the research, also project overarching, for example with the Research cluster SmartProSys. “The work of process engineers is often not as tangible as that of mechanical engineers or computer scientists, for example, as they are dedicated to industrial material and energy conversion processes that take place inside equipment and are usually invisible,” she says. ”But it will be our task to change industrial processes over the next 20 years in such a way that German industry can produce CO2-neutrally by 2050 at the latest.”
To the official press release of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg