Chemical-free pest control by means of dielectric heating with radio waves: selective heating

Dielectric heating with radio waves (RW) and microwaves (MW) are alternatives to treatments with hazardous chemicals or hot air for pest control. In particular, RW can be used to heat up bulky materials with larger size (in the meter range) homogeneously and smoothly in order to eliminate embedded pest organisms. Dielectric heating, in principle, enables selective overheating of certain materials in a heterogeneous mixture. This unique feature of electromagnetic heating methods, in contrast to techniques being based on thermal conduction, is caused by significant differences in the dielectric properties of pest organisms and matrix materials. The present study proves unambiguously that selective heating of cylindrical pest organisms in wood matrices occurs under defined conditions. The selective heating effect strongly depends on the orientation of the pest organisms in the electric field. For a parallel alignment, maximum overheating factors (ratio of adiabatic local heating rates) of 2 to 3 were determined experimentally. In case of a perpendicular alignment, no overheating was detected. A simulation of electric field and power loss density distributions in pest organisms and in their vicinity in the wood matrix, using a finite element method, can qualitatively explain the experimental results. According to the simulation, the overheating occurs not directly within the pest organism but in the wood matrix in the vicinity on both ends of the cylinder-shaped pest organism