Development of Efficient Designs of Cooking Systems. I. Experimental

Abstract

In the conventional cooking practice, where a pot or a pan is directly placed on a flame, the thermal energy efficiency is in the range of 10–25%. It was thought desirable to increase this efficiency up to 60% or more. The cooking systems can be of various sizes. In the developing world (85% of the world’s population), open pan cooking is largely still practiced at the family level (4–10 people) or at the community level (50–2000 people or more). The latter requirement is encountered in schools, homes for senior citizens, jails, social and/or religious centers (temples, mosques, churches), social and/or educational functions (conferences, marriages, celebrations, etc.), remand homes, etc. For these different types of final application, in the present work, cooking systems have been developed. A systematic work has has been reported regarding the effect of several parameters on thermal efficiency. The parameters include the cooker size, number of pots, size and aspect ratio of the pots, heat flux, flame size, flux–time relationship, insulating alternatives, etc. Local and global optima of the parameters have been obtained, resulting in thermal efficiency of about 70%.

Kinetics of cooking of unsoaked and presoaked split peas (Cajanus cajan)

“…About 40% of the total energy consumed in the developing World (population more than 4 billion) is used for cooking (Joshi et al, ). In developing countries, where 70% of the population resides in rural areas, open pan cooking method is still the most widely used process, which has thermal efficiency ∼15%.…”

“…To design any efficient cooking device, kinetics of cooking for particular food material must be studied. Shinde, Vijayadwhaja, Pandit, and Joshi (), Joshi et al () have designed the energy efficient batch and continuous cookers for cooking rice, lentils, and vegetables. Estimating the kinetics of reaction is one of the important step, while designing of reactor for bulk production of any chemical.…”

Image analysis based validation and kinetic parameter estimation of rice cooking

“…In order to design any efficient cooking device, kinetics of cooking for particular food material must be studied. Shinde et al (), Joshi et al () have designed the energy efficient batch and continuous cookers. Presented work utilizes simple method for determining kinetics of rice cooking, which can be easily extended to obtain kinetics of any other food material. …”

Design and development of energy efficient continuous cooking system

“…Joshi et al (2012aJoshi et al ( , 2012b and Singhal et al (2012) have successfully utilized the cooking kinetics for designing 4, 6, 24, 40, 72, 120, 160 and 700 l energy efficient batch cooking devices. These batch consume about 350 kcal to cook one kg of rice (efficiency about 70%) whereas traditional cooking methods require nearly 1600 kCal to cook the same amount of food (about 12-16% efficiency).…”

“…Various heating methods ranging from three-stone fires, biomass and gas stoves, electrical, microwave and induction ovens have been used over the years for cooking. Depending on the method used, the overall thermal efficiency may vary from 10% to 15% for traditional cooking, which can be increased up to 70% for thermally efficient cooking devices (Joshi et al, 2012a).…”