Temperature field optimization for distributed combined heat of multi-microwave sources based on group consistency under time-varying communication topology

Microwave heating is one of the commonly used methods for heat treatment of various materials. This paper proposes a consistent variable power heating strategy under multi microwave source cluster switching topology mode. Firstly, a distributed structure of microwave source cluster collaborative output with bidirectional ring communication topology was constructed using virtual structure method. On this basis, nonlinear distributed control with consistent output of microwave source clusters in different modes was achieved. Meanwhile, a microwave source clustering scheme is proposed, and the objective function of automatic power allocation for each subgroup and its constraint function are constructed to realize the formation of different clustering modes in different time periods, and the consistent output of self-allocation of power for each subgroup. Secondly, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy are verified by the experiments of heating SiC materials in a high-power microwave reactor and analyzing the temperature uniformity and energy conversion efficiency during the heating process. Finally, the simulation results show that the temperature uniformity is improved by 35.7%-63.6% and the energy conversion efficiency is improved by 27.9%-41.1%, which can effectively optimize the temperature field distribution.