Swarun Kumar

In this paper, we first conduct measurement studies to understand the energy distribution for eight microwave ovens and show their energy distribution is very skewed and the energy at the center, where typically food is placed, is often low. We develop a measurement-based modeling by comparing the image from a thermal camera with a normalized EM field in simulation, where we also developed parameter refinement to match the simulation with measurements. We propose a novel approach that uses low-cost passive metasurfaces to significantly enhance the energy distribution. We develop a model for the electromagnetic wave propagation inside a microwave oven. We then systematically optimize metasurface pattern and their placement. Our method is flexible and can support a variety of optimization objectives. We experiment using a commodity microwave oven and demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.