When you place a water or food in a microwave oven, it heats.
Which process commits more energy to that: dielectric heating, or ion drag i.e. resistive heating?
AFAIK, in distilled water (which is a dielectric) dielectric heating is close to 100%.
What about regular (non-distilled) water? Mineral water? Sea water? Salty & wet food?
Is dielectric heating still gives more energy to the water/food then the resistive heating i.e. ion drag?
Best Answer
So, this is an old post that I came across when I had a similar question. Here's a paper where they dissolve different amounts of ions in the water and found that the ability for the microwave oven to heat the water actually reduces as more ions are introduced.
So from this study, you could conclude that ion drag is not source of heating in the water.