Development and Testing of a Solar Cooker with Thermal Energy Storage System

Abstract

Cooking is the major necessity for people all over the world. It accounts for a major share of energy consumption in developing countries. Therefore there is a critical need for the development of alternative and affordable methods of cooking. Solar cooking is a novel and eco friendly method of harnessing sun’s energy. There are many types of solar cookers like solar panel cookers, solar parabolic cookers and solar box cookers which are expensive. Solar cookers can be of a great use in saving fuel and enabling in eco friendly cooking of food. In this work a solar cooker with thermal storage system using phase change material is developed.  The size of the cooker is designed by calculating the energy required to cook food for 2-4 persons. Paraffin is chosen as phase change material to store the energy, which will be utilized in the absence of sunlight. A solar cooker with phase change material will be compared with another solar cooker of similar dimensions. The cooker is tested as per the standard procedure to estimate the figures of merit which was estimated to be 0.3102 for the cooker with thermal storage and 0.2946 for a cooker without thermal storage. The payback of the cooker was 7.87 years reducing a carbon foot print of 80.541 kg CO₂/year