The Impact of Microwave Penetration Depth on the Process of Heating the Moulding Sand with Sodium Silicate

Abstract This paper presents the impact of microwave penetration depth on the process of heating the moulding sand with sodium silicate. For each material it is affected by: the wavelength in vacuum and the real and imaginary components of the relative complex electrical permittivity ε r for a selected measurement frequency. Since the components are not constant values and they change depending on the electrical parameters of materials and the frequency of the electromagnetic wave, it is indispensable to carry out laboratory measurements to determine them. Moreover, the electrical parameters of materials are also affected by: temperature, packing degree, humidity and conductivity. The measurements of the dielectric properties of moulding sand with sodium silicate was carried out using the perturbation method on a stand of waveguide resonance cavity. The real and imaginary components of the relative complex electrical permittivity was determined for moulding sand at various contents of sodium silicate and at various packing degrees of the samples. On the basis of the results the microwave penetration depth of moulding sand with sodium silicate was established. Relative literature contains no such data that would be essential to predicting an effective process of microwave heating of moulding sand with sodium silicate. Both the packing degree and the amount of sodium silicate in moulding sand turned out to affect the penetration depth, which directly translates into microwave power density distribution in the process of microwave heating of moulding sand with sodium silicate.