Design and development of field emission based magnetron for industrial applications using CFDTD PIC simulations

Magnetron is a high-power vacuum tube that generates microwaves based on the interaction of a stream of moving electrons under a cross electric and magnetic fields with a series of open coupled metal cavity resonators. The magnetron is widely used in radars and also well-known as a low-cost microwave source for microwave ovens. Traditionally, a thermionic cathode is used as the electron source and a heater is needed to increase the temperature of the cathode up to about 1,000 K. In this work, a field emission based magnetron is investigated for industrial applications as an easier configuration and longer lifetime can be expected. The design and development are performed using a conformal finite-difference time-domain (CFDTD) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations as implemented in the VSim code. The goal of this research is to design and develop magnetrons operating at frequencies 2.48 GHz and 2.43 GHz and at a working power of > 3 kW for industrial applications.