CLEAN-HEAT

CLEAN-HEAT was a 24-month project funded by the European Commission's H2020 Framework Program under the SME Instrument Phase 2 funding program.The CLEAN-HEAT consortium consisted of the lead SME, Fricke and Mallah Microwave Technology GmbH (FM), working with another SME, Microwave Technology (MTL). These SME partners were supported by a number of third parties, including Pera Technology Solutions Ltd and London Metropolitan University (LMU).Magnetrons are now the most widely used microwave technology for both industrial and domestic microwaves. However, these systems can only achieve efficiencies of around 45 to 50% and pose a safety risk as they operate at high voltage (5kV) and the magnetrons have a short lifetime requiring frequent replacement. Magnetron technology does not allow automatic adjustment of the power level to load fluctuations. These limitations impose huge costs on industrial microwave processes and there are calls for more efficient solutions. Across Europe, microwaves consume over 9.6 TWh of electrical energy annually.

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FM wanted to upgrade its 200W solid-state continuous wave microwave system to address these limitations. The 1kW gallium nitride (GaN)-based microwave system needed to save at least 25% of power consumption, operate at greater than 70% efficiency, enable automatic power level adjustment in response to load variations and significantly reduce device size. Also important was the increased lifetime to avoid frequent and costly replacements. With all these excellent features and performance benefits, our product needed to be cost competitive with magnetron based microwave sources.Solid state microwave technology has many applications including humidity meters, medical RF surgery and domestic and industrial heat processing. It also offers the possibility of automatic power adjustment, which improves energy efficiency and faster processing speeds than conventional magnetron systems. Full adoption of our technology in microwave ovens in both domestic and industrial applications would result in potential energy savings of 6.74 TWh of electrical energy across Europe.