Experimental Study On The Effective Permittivity Of Saponification Reaction

Microwave has been used in all kind of domains of chemistry; but, we know little about the interaction mechanism between microwave and chemical reaction. The key problem is to obtain the effective permittivity of chemical system when we study the interaction between microwave and chemical reaction.Chemical reactions are non-equilibrium systems which could be considered as mixture of substances in microwave chemistry. In the process of chemical reaction, the new substances are creating, meanwhile the old substances are reducing. Up to now, there isn't a perfect theory to describe the effective permittivity of this non-equilibrium system. The traditional theories, such as the Clausius-Mossoti equation, the Onsager equation, the statistical-mechanical theory and the Debye's equation, which all based on equilibrium state, can't be used to describe the effective permittivity in chemical reactionsIn this paper, we selected a classical saponification reaction withCH3COOC2H5 and NaOHto study the effective permittivity in chemical reactions. In these experiments, the chemical reaction systems were homogeneous while they were stirred all the time. When the temperature of the reaction system was maintained as a constant, we used special designed coaxial-line probes to measure their reflection; then, we used some methods such as Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (FDTD), Genetic Algorithms, and polynomial regression to get the effective permittivity of the chemical reaction system changed with time; The discussion of the effective permittivity of the saponification reaction is also presented in this paper.