If you on a regular basis carelessly nuke material , you ’ll hump that in some casing you ’ll come back to warm food , in some event you ’ll come back to shriveled , dried food , and sometimes you ’ll come back to a fervor in your low microwave oven . What difference caused these effect ?
Microwaves , despite being around for a half a century , have n’t lost their sensory faculty of mystique . Sometimes you come back to them and your food is red-hot , sometimes it ’s strong , and sometimes , when the tray gets stuck , it ’s a patchwork of hot and cold . Then again , sometimes , it has spontaneously burst into flames . This happens especially often when citizenry microwave damp material ordamp paperin order to get it wry .
But wait , we know how a microwave works . The electromagnetic wave that are sent back and off across the little lit cavern inside the microwave are intend to shake water molecules . And as much as you excite water corpuscle , they do n’t entrance on fire . What should happen is the weewee have excited . . . until it just apparently boil off the food . At that full point , there is no longer any more water inside the food for thought and the waves do n’t do anything . How could anything blacken ?
For one thing , unmingled water is n’t too much of a job . It ’s when electrolyte , like table salt , are in the water that thing begin to inflame up . Salt let weewee carry an galvanizing current . This is n’t a problem for homely water or really soaked intellectual nourishment . No fires are started when anyone micro-cook salt water . The job is when two areas have a raft of salty wet in them and there ’s a dry position between them . Electrons from one surface area could be yearning to go to the other , but the space between them wo n’t lease it happen . Until the electrical potential between the two areas gets too great . Then – crack ! – a spark arcs between them , the same way lightning arcs through the non - conductive air between the sky and Earth . ( And the same manner alloy will actuate in the microwave . ) And just like lightning , this electric discharge make a quite a little of warmth . That passion , which is being created in a dry area in the nutrient , or cloth , or paper , starts burning thing . So when you fare back to the microwave oven to get your solid food scorched , what often happened was a ‘ lightning thunderbolt ’ between two wet domain in the food .
Image : Heb on Wiki Commons
ViaThe Naked Scientists , UCSB , andChow Hound .
MicrowavesPhysicsScience
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