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Solid-state microwave heating for biomedical applications

Imtiaz, Azeem 2015. Solid-state microwave heating for biomedical applications. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.
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Abstract

The research conducted in this thesis aims to develop an efficient microwave delivery system employing miniature resonant microwave cavities, targeted at compact, flexible and ideally field-deployable microwave-assisted diagnostic healthcare applications. The system comprises a power amplifier as a solid-state microwave source and a load - as a single mode cavity resonator to hold the sample. The compactness of the practical microwave delivery system relies on the direct integration of the sample-holding cavity resonator to the power amplifier and inclusion of the built-in directional coupler for power measurements. The solid state power transistors used in this research (10W-LDMOS, 10W-GaN) were provided by the sponsoring company NXP Inc. In practical microwave delivery applications, the impedance environment of the cavity resonators change significantly, and this thesis shows how this can be systematically utilized to present the optimal loading conditions to the transistor by simply designing the series delay lines. This load transfer technique, which critically can be achieved without employing bulky, lossy and physically larger output matching networks, allows high performance of the power amplifier to be achieved through waveform engineering at the intrinsic plane of the transistor. Starting with the impedance observation of a rectangular cavity, using only series delay lines allowed the practical demonstration of the high power and high efficiency fully integrated inverse class-F (F-1) power amplifier. Temperature is an important factor in a microwave heating and delivery system as it changes the impedance environment of the cavity resonator. This natural change in both cavity and sample temperature can be accommodated through simplified series matching lines and the microwave heating system capable of working over substantial bandwidth was again practically demonstrated. The inclusion of the coupler maintained the compactness of the system. In the practical situations envisaged, the microwave delivery system needs to accommodate natural variation between sample volumes and consistencies for heating. The experimental work considered the heating of different sample volumes ii of water, and characterizing the change in the natural impedance environment of the cavity as a result. It was shown how the natural impedance variation can not only be accommodated, but also exploited, allowing ‘continuous’, high-efficiency performance to be achieved while processing a wide range of sample volumes. Specifically, using only transistor package parasitic, the impedance of the cavity itself together with a single series microstrip transmission line allows a continuous class-F-1 mode loading condition to be identified. Through different experiments, the microwave delivery systems with high-performance are demonstrated which are compact, flexible and efficient over operational bandwidth of the cavity resonators.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Date Type: Completion
Status: Unpublished
Schools: Engineering
Subjects: T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Solid-State; Power amplifier; Bio-Medical
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 30 March 2016
Last Modified: 16 Dec 2022 16:21
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/73775

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