What keeps microwave radiation from leaking out the oven door?
Isn’t it dangerous to look into an operating microwave oven? The screen across the door just doesn’t seem capable of protecting us. Still, I believe the government safety experts would have thought of this and wouldn’t allow dangerous ovens on the market. How are the safety margins measured and how do you know when an oven “goes bad”? — Ernst Gebhardt If you ask me, one of the cleverest parts of a microwave oven is the door. It lets you see into the oven to make sure your potato isn’t about to explode, yet keeps your face from being cooked off by microwaves in the process. It accomplishes this remarkable feat with a metal mesh-basically a sheet of metal with a regular pattern of small holes drilled or punched in it. This, along with the metal material of the oven cavity itself, forms a sort of reverse Faraday cage. A Faraday cage is a metal enclosure that normally keeps electrostatic fields and RF (radio frequency) radiation from getting in, but in the case of the oven, from getting ou
