Apparatus and method for investigation of energy consumption of microwave assisted drying systems.

Convective, hot air drying by itself is relatively efficient for removing water from the surface environment of agricultural seed products. However, moving internal moisture to the surface needs rather a long time, as a rule. The major research aim of the authors was to decrease the processing time and processing costs, to improve the quality of the dried product, and to increase drying efficiency. For this reason their research activities focused on the development of a special drying apparatus and a method suitable for measuring of energy conditions in a hybrid (microwave and convective) dryer. Experimental investigations were made with moistened wheat as model material. Experiments were carried out in microwave, convective and hybrid drying systems. The microwave drying alone was more efficient than the convective method. The lowest energy consumption and shortest drying time were obtained by the use of a hybrid method in which the waste energy of magnetron was utilized and the temperature was controlled. In this way, it was possible to keep the temperature of the dried product at a constant and safe value and to considerably decrease the energy consumption.

Apparatus and method to measure dielectric properties (epsilon(') and epsilon(")) of ionic liquids.

Conventional techniques for measurement of dielectric properties of ionic liquids or electrolyte solutions fail because the samples are largely short circuited by the high electrical conductance. The object of the author's research activity was to elaborate an apparatus (microwave dielectrometer) and method suitable to measure the dielectric constant (epsilon(')) and loss factor (epsilon(")) of well conducting ionic liquids and other solvents. This process is based on a revised waveguide method completed with an automatic calibration possibility. Contrary to conventional measuring methods this technique uses about 20 W/g power density. The measurements were carried out at 2.45 GHz frequency in the temperature range from 10 up to 100 degrees C. The obtained (epsilon(')) and (epsilon(")) values of different solvents were compared with several published (calculated and measured) data. Statistical analysis was used to determine the error of measurements and distilled water was chosen as a standard for study of data dispersion. To accomplish statistical analysis, namely, the dielectric characteristics have to be determined at the same temperature. The values of variances were less or equal 1 in case of epsilon(') and decrease with increasing temperature. In case of epsilon(") the variance data were much smaller.

Reactions of 3-isochromanone with aromatic aldehydes--microwave assisted condensations performed on solid basic inorganic supports.

An improved Knoevenagel condensation of 3-isochromanone and aromatic aldehydes can be achieved by microwave irradiation on solid supports in the presence of various catalysts. This synthetic method offers some major advantages, especially the possibility to change the ratio of E/Z isomers.