hey everybody! today I want to give some love
to everybody's favorite household appliance the microwave oven. now for most people, these
are simply a way to just heat up food in a hurry and for that they're pretty decent. but for people
like me, microwaves are so much more than that microwaves are useful for a lot of
cooler things than just cooking food in fact, my parents microwave was probably my first
platform for experimenting with electromagnetism unfortunately that oven uh mysteriously
died not long after they got it the nice thing is that microwaves don't even
have to be working to be useful to me. lethality aside, the transformer and capacitor inside are
great for high voltage projects like tesla coils the glass tray and turntable motor can be used to
make a simple laser show, and even the oven casing itself is useful as a disposable blast chamber. now
i've done a ton of projects using microwave parts in this channel, but today i actually want to focus
on the oven itself. and since this is my channel i think there's some room to make some
upgrades on this wonderful appliance as well so yeah i hope you enjoy this video. oh yeah,
before i go on i should warn you that all the crazy stuff you're about to see was done
completely for educational purposes. i mean if you were to try any of this stuff at home, you'd
probably die, so yeah please don't try this at home alright so what kind of stuff can you even do with
a microwave? well the obvious use is cooking stuff but this isn't super exciting by itself and it's
often slower than i'd like. and besides, you can do this with an ordinary oven as well. but this isn't
some ordinary oven, this is a science oven. this bad boy cooks food with a huge electromagnetic field .
i can use this field to check on the condition of my low pressure gas tubes. has this plasma
globe taken on air since the last time i hit it with a tesla coil? a quick run in the microwave
shows that it's still intact. but not for long how about these cheap neon indicators
i bought on ebay? are they any good? i'll take that as a yes. microwaves are great for
chemistry as well. in fact regular old microwave ovens have been used in chemical synthesis
for years in academic labs. now when it comes to actually cooking food, there's still a lot
left to be desired. i mean it's been over 70 years since the first microwave ovens, yet the
new ones aren't any more powerful. what gives? it turns out the people who make these things have
been feeding us lives for years! so hear me out what happens when you use the 50% setting for slow
cooking? any self-respecting person would expect the oven to simply run at half power, but check out
that power draw. what actually happens is that the oven runs at full power for an amount of time, then
turns off for a while before repeating the cycle sure it averages out given enough time, but it's
still dirty. now admittedly that one's not that big of a deal, but it does lead us to the light that's
downright disgusting. what happens when you use the hundred percent setting? most people don't question
this setting because it's all they've ever known but let's take a look at what that looks
like in slow-mo. see how they flash like that? yeah that's right, even at the 100% setting, the
bulbs are only on half the time, and this is because the oven is only producing microwaves half
the time. what a scam! anybody who watches my videos knows that half power just isn't gonna cut it for
me. i think it's time for some upgrades. alright so i've taken this thing apart to expose the
circuitry inside. now i gotta say it, poking around in a microwave is not for the inexperienced.
when electronics hobbyists get killed by their projects, it's almost always because they're
messing around with microwave parts like these anyway here's the reason why the oven's only
on half the time. so this magnetron here, which is actually the source of microwaves in the
oven, is powered by feeding the output of this high voltage transformer into this half wave
voltage doubler circuit. now the very nature of the circuit means that the magnetron is
only going to be powered on half of the AC cycle. now if the transformers in these things
weren't ran so ridiculously close to saturation you could just throw in another capacitor and
diode to make the full wave doubler and call it a day but you can't. so that means i have to
sacrifice another microwave for the transformer but before i do that, let's start with a quick
control run because this is a science video after all, sort of. i'm going to start by ripping this
plastic covering off of the door. the metal grid will still stop microwaves from escaping, but now
i'll be able to see inside with my thermal camera. i actually learned this thermal camera
trick from the youtuber cyparagon well he's not really a youtuber. i've just known
him from various nerdy online groups over the years, but he does have some cool vids on youtube
regardless. so a cup of water heats by about 28 degrees celsius in a minute, which also suggests
about 40% efficiency. now obviously this isn't quite fast enough for my liking. i went ahead and
unlocked full power mode here. i've added another transformer, as well as some more diodes and
capacitors to make the full wave doubler circuit but wait! won't a microwave using double the
power trip the breaker? well it's nothing a little bit of copper wire duct tape can't fix. just
kidding. we have appliance outlets for a reason i was too lazy to use the original controls on
the microwave so now i'm using this huge variac to power it. now the nice thing is this actually
allows me to control the power, as opposed to just plugging that abomination directly into
mains. a quick power up with neon bulbs shows that the oven is indeed working. slow-mo video
confirms that the oven is actually producing microwaves on the full cycle. sure there's some
ripple, but at least it's on the entire time now a benefit of the new setup is that it bypasses
all the safety mechanisms, which means the oven door doesn't even have to be closed for it to
operate. this is super convenient for the time to need to irradiate large objects with kilowatts
of microwaves. i was curious how a camera would react inside my faraday cage with the open oven,
so i stuck one of my old cameras in there with it amazingly it actually survived this. now i should
note that doing an experiment like this without extensive shielding will lead to the fcc and
local hams hunting you down, so uh, don't do that let's go ahead and redo that water heating
experiment with a full power microwave. the original microwave drew a little under 1200 watts
so i'm going to dial the power to about 2400 watts this time. over the course of a minute, the
power draw actually increased to about 2800 watts probably due to the toasty magnetron filament
spitting off more electrons as it heated the full power microwave heated the water
way faster this time. 63 degrees celsius in one minute. some rough calculations show
that the efficiency was unchanged as well giving about 40 percent efficiency. how about
something a little more practical? check it out an apple is heated to deliciousness in half the
time it normally takes. talk about convenience. now i know what you're thinking, what happens when i
give this setup even more power? let's find out by cooking this banana at four kilowatts. okay let's
slowly crank up the power there. yeah seems good oh come on it clearly arced over in there, but i'm not even
totally certain why. the extra power certainly plays a role, but i think the geometry
of the banana may be a culprit as well i'm thinking it acts as a lens and or
antenna that focuses microwaves to the tip which causes dielectric breakdown
from the huge electric field maybe laying the banana on its side will prevent
this from happening? well here goes nothing hmm that doesn't sound very good maybe i can just give it more power and
it'll heat the banana along with the plasma nope the magnetron is definitely dead
now. wait why is it on fire? oh come on pocket sand. unfortunately this puny little
magnetron just couldn't hack the extra power now it's not like i can just throw in a bigger
magnetron either well not without shelling out thousands of dollars. so why not use a bunch of
smaller magnetrons? well the issue with that is then you introduce a bunch of phase matching and
even impedance matching issues. hmm wait what am i thinking? why are we using this dinosaur technology
when we could be using freaking lasers to cook food? well there's a few reasons really. it takes
a relatively huge amount of energy to cook food due to water's high heat capacity, so a laser that
could cook in a reasonable amount of time would have to be ridiculously powerful and dangerous.
luckily, ridiculously powerful lasers are what i do best. in fact i already have on hand some of
the scariest semiconductor modules on the planet these are integrated laser diode arrays. they
may not look like much, but each one is capable of tens of thousands of times as much power as a
laser pointer. it's honestly hard to convey just how dangerous each one of these can be, and the
hilarious thing is that i'm going to need to run a bunch of them side by side at full power to pull
off cooking with them. judging by the scratched out part numbers and lack of documentation, i'm going
to guess that i'm probably not supposed to have these. so how am i going to turn these things into
a laser oven? well honestly i'm not even sure yet so i'm just going to start smashing
things together until something works all right so this is what the completed laser oven
looks like. so i have my array of laser arrays here on top and that's powered via this power supply
that's fed through some drivers on the back now I also added this water cooling loop here
just because there's so much power going through this thing that i simply couldn't get away
with just some passive cooling there. the new laser equipped oven draws about two kilowatts at
full power, and about 700 watts of that makes it out as laser light. in fact, that makes it the most
powerful cw laser build i've shown on this channel now in order to visualize this ridiculous power,
i've stuck a mirror in there so you can see what the beam looks like. i've actually had to turn
down the power here because otherwise the beam just washes out my camera's sensor. just to give
you an idea on how ridiculous this oven is, the highest danger rating a laser product can get is
class IV, and that happens at half a watt of output power. since the output on this thing is 700 watts,
that means that it eclipses that rating by over a thousand times. that means you probably won't
be seeing these in stores anytime soon. alright so the beam's flashy and all but how good is it
at cooking food? let's start with a piece of toast that smells so good! as you can tell this laser oven is really more of a laser
grill since the cooking is one-sided but that's not really that big of a deal
since i can just flip it over halfway through well that looks interesting. i wonder what
that tastes like? well here goes nothing that's really good! wow it's like a carbon foam
flavor. it's really unique. i mean you can't make toast like this in a regular microwave. popping
popcorn with a laser is one of my most requested experiments to try on this channel. let's
see how well the laser oven can pull it off hmm that isn't doing a very good job. the beam
must be too concentrated, since the surfaces of the kernels are vaporizing off faster than the
inside can be heated to the point of popping let's see if i can fix that with a
diffuser plate to spread out the beam okay there it goes. some turntable
action couldn't hurt as well oh yeah look at that it's doing an awesome job now.
that's way more interesting than the traditional way of cooking popcorn. is laser popcorn as good
as the microwave stuff? one way to find out wow that was wow that is incredible. it has like a
smoky flavor to it. yeah definitely beats microwave definitely beats microwave. again with those
like hints of the carbon foam flavor you know one of my favorite flavors. it's funny because
if i would have stuck with my phd program i would have been working on inertial confinement fusion
lasers by now, and yet here i am, cooking popcorn with a laser oven. i guess i can do that as a
youtuber as well since i actually have this set of optical amplifiers from a government
attempt at building a laser fusor. that's for a different video though. i've had campfire
s'mores and i've had microwave s'mores but i've never had laser smores. perhaps the secret to the
perfect s'mores by cooking it with laser beams ? oh yeah check that out, it's making the chocolate
nice and melty there. it looks like it's adding a bit of crisp to it as well. yummy. all right
let's add some marshmallows there huh it's kind of hard to tell whether they're melting or if the
white color is just reflecting off all the light okay yeah it's definitely melting there wow.
yeah i think that's ready to eat. man i hope these things taste as good as they smell because
wow, that is quite a fragrance. all right here we go wow yet again i am very impressed.
and one of the big themes about this laser oven i'm finding is that
nice that charred flavor you know man i love carbon. it's a shame that you
can't just like sell these things at the store, because man you guys are missing out.
now that i'm making campfire foods i can't make s'mores without also giving hot dogs
a try. one nice thing about the laser oven is that leaving the door open won't jam
nearby electronics or make the fcc angry however my eyes would be destroyed in a fraction
of a second if i took off my laser goggles i probably should have spent more time designing
a beam diffusing system but uh whatever mmm that one's actually really
good again with that like uh it's like a char boiled flavor but i don't even
need like a grill or whatever you use to do that yeah there's this like really distinct aftertaste
i mean it lasts a really long time and i mean really a lot of things from this laser
give an aftertaste that lasts a long time how about a laser cooked egg? is it even cooking in
there? it's hard to tell since the wood's burning a lot but it might just be reflecting off all that
light. i was kind of hoping for something like a hard-boiled egg here but i don't know what's going
on. yeah i don't think i'm gonna be eating this one maybe i can do better with a different
breakfast food? in all honesty i'm usually too lazy to heat these things up,
and just eat them straight out of the wrapper fun fact, when i was a starving college student
i found that pop-tarts were the highest amount of energy i could buy for a dollar in my school's
vending machines. breakfast of champions right here it's a little um a little on the crispy side um yeah
it's all right not used to my uh chocolate being so toasty i guess. how about some double
roasted cashews? i love the smell of roasted nuts oh those give off a ton of smoke in there. it must
be the oil or something. well here goes nothing oh oh no oh oh that's terrible yeah that is
one thing the laser oven can't do. all right i've had enough appetizers today i think it's
time for the main course. many people will argue that nothing can beat the flavor of a microwave
steak, but i think this laser oven can pull it off. wow i just can't get over that incredible
smoky fragrance. i better flip it over to make sure it gets the other side. yeah that thing is
being lasered to perfection. oh i almost forgot i can't have a steak dinner without some laser
caramelized onions. hmm looks like the onion is a bit reflective to the blue laser light. i
guess i can just leave it in there for a while okay yeah i think that's good enough for
now. wow check out that beautiful meal now that is instagram worthy. let's
give that steak a try first all right might be a little on the uh might be
a little overdone uh it's kind of hard to tell you know not used to cooking with lasers but man
it's it is a delicious flavor again with that uh that like carbonization of
the uh of the food there well that was delicious i mean what should i
try next. probably the caramelized onion there mmm nice and sweet. you know i didn't get any char
on that piece let's try uh let's try this piece um that that's amazing wow i
almost forgot about my texas toast that's so good. man i love the future. all right i am
stuffed now, so i figured this would be a good time to go over some of the pros and cons of my laser
oven. so uh the pros right. i mean the biggest one is it's a laser oven. i mean cooking food with
lasers is automatically cool. it also has a good uh has a good way of like adding a smoky flavor to
things. sometimes that can be a problem i mean a lot of has to come down with the oven likes
to cook uh like put most of the energy in like the first few millimeters of the surface of the
food you're cooking so that can be problematic so that's why it like charred absolutely
everything you put inside of it. i mean if i were to use like red or ir lasers for this like
near ir then it would have probably done a better job at cooking food more uniformly and having a
better diffuser plate in there would have probably helped too but uh so i mean this was just like
there could be improvements on it obviously but i i feel like you could do a laser oven that
would cook more uniformly and actually be like you know comparable to a microwave so maybe
i'll make another oven with uh with red lasers or maybe i'll just make a mega microwave with a
giant magnetron and do it that way. so yeah it was an interesting experiment and this was probably
one of the most requested things to do in my channel, at least cook food with lasers. so yeah i'm
glad i did it. oh yeah one more thing before i go i decided to make a shorts channel
since all the cool people are doing it if you like bite-sized science demos in
a vertical format then you'll probably like the insanity that i'll be posting there.
i'll be sure to put a link in the description well that's about all i have for you today so
until the next time stay safe and happy lazing
Good ole Styropyro. Never a dull moment.
Link that starts at the time OP mentioned: https://youtu.be/fM9hYzJnao0?t=4m44s
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