Modeling Microwave Heating and Drying of Lignocellulosic Foams through Coupled Electromagnetic and Heat Transfer Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors developed a microwave heating model to predict the microwave power to evaporate the water in the lignocellulosic fiber. The design and interpretation are adequate. However, the authors did not consider if there is any difference between the free water and bounded water in the system. Please elaborate in revision.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, a microwave heating model was developed by coupling electromagnetic and heat transfer physics using a commercial finite element code. The modeling results of the predicted heating time behavior were consistent with experimental results as impacted by electromagnetic fields, waveguide size and microwave power absorption. This paper can be accepted after addressing the following issues:

1. Line 26, please use ";" instead of ",".
2. In Introduction, since this paper is a modeling-base work, please add the descriptions of the modeling approaches reported in this filed (e.g., Heat transfer enhancement and exergy efficiency improvement of a micro combustor with internal spiral fins for thermophotovoltaic systems, etc.). More work reported in the literature should be added in the paragraph of "Finite Element (FE) methods numerically solve...".
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of 3D FE model?
4. How did you determine the dimensions of the physical model? How did you choose the meshes in Figure 1?
5. In Table 3, what are the power reported in the literature? Did you consider a higher time increase?
6. In Section 3 of Experimental, please provide a schematic of the experimental system. More details of the experiments should be given.
7. In Table 5, how could you ensure the accuracy of the comparisons between the experimental data and the calculated values?
8. In Figure 3, why the variations between these two values are bigger with a bigger volume?
9. In Figure 4, it is hard to distinguish the differences in both figures. There are two different factors, i.e., time and power percent.
10. In Figure 7, it is better to provide a prediction line for the relationship of water remaining percent and volume.
11. Please use different color for the symbols in the figures.
12. What are the experimental limitations in the present work?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Please illustrate the errors between the measured and calculated data in Figure 3.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf