As a gem of Chinese culture for thousands of years history, Chinese herb medicine still occupies an important role in the development of Chinese medicine industry. What’s more, during these years people at home and abroad pay more attention on traditional Chinese medicine which leads to the increasing demand.
While traditional treatment processes can’t meet this increasing demand, the manufactures of Chinese herbal medicine gradually turn their eyes on the new techniques and equipments, that is microwave technology.
For quite a long time, people use traditional drying and sterilization like hot wind and far infrared method to dry the medicine, and use high temperature and high pressure to sterilize the medicine, which may destroy the medicine efficacy and value in some extent.
In 1940s the first microwave oven was made by Raytheon Company, from then on microwave technology were widely used in all fields from food, chemical to medicine. Now microwave techniques have applied in the drying, sterilization as well as extraction processing for Chinese herb medicine. Currently, microwave techniques are mainly used for low temperature sterilization of oral liquid, capsule, drying of Chinese traditional medicine pills, Chinese patent medicine, powder, and extraction of Chinese traditional herbs and so on .
In the market, there are many kinds of microwave equipments such as microwave medicine drying equipment, microwave medicine extraction drying equipment, pills drying equipment, powder drying equipment and so on.
And mass of data demonstrated that the quality of Chinese traditional drug that using microwave techniques are higher than that of using traditional techniques
. Compared with the traditional techniques, microwave techniques and equipments have the following advantages:
1. The quality of the medicine has been improved. The medical efficacy has kept to a maximum and with better appearance after microwave drying.
2. Energy saving, less energy consumption is needed. Since microwave only need to act on the materials themselves, it will need less energy.
3. Better production environment. Microwave equipment does not need complex systems, so it helps to improve the health conditions of the manufacture.
4. Raising production speed.. The production speed using microwave techniques are as 50-80 as using traditional ways.
In addition, microwave techniques can be used for the disinsection and mildew proofing process which making the medicine easy to store and keep the efficacy of the Chinese herbal medicine. It is surely that the application of microwave techniques in this field will promote the development of traditional Chinese medicine
