Experimental Study on Solar Cooker Using Phase Change Materials

Abstract

The main objective of our project is to conserve the available solar energy and improve its utilization with the help of phase change material; here we have absorbed solar energy to prepare food especially for cooking rice, boiling potatoes and eggs. The use of PCM in the solar cooker has improved its efficiency over conventional solar cooker and cooking food hot in off sunshine hours. It is being eco-friendly and other than that it save fuel, gas, coal which are exhaustible source of energy. In the present article some of different phase change materials are studied for solar cooking and among them Coconut Oil (commercial grade) is found to be a good latent heat storage which is experimentally tested in a simple box type solar cooker and the comparison is made with and without PCM.Key word: solar cooker, coconut oil, concentrating lens, phase change materials.

Enhancement the solar box cooker performance using steel fibers

“…In addition to the traditional method of improving the performance of SBC by adding a reflector(s), the performance of SBC is also improved by modifying the cooking pot [13][14][15][16][17] or adding materials to the inside of the cooker. [18][19][20][21][22][23] The performance of SBC is evaluated by several parameters, including Performance Characteristics, First and Second figures of merit, Time Boiling, Parameter Index, Standard Cooking Power, cooker optothermal ratio (COR), Thermal efficiency, and Exergy efficiency. [24][25][26][27] Mawire et al 28 compared two SBCs with a reflector and without a reflector by evaluating both energy efficiency and exergy efficiency with several water loads.…”

“…The second reason is subject to development and improvement, which prompted many researchers to search and investigate to raise the performance of SBC. In addition to the traditional method of improving the performance of SBC by adding a reflector(s), the performance of SBC is also improved by modifying the cooking pot 13–17 or adding materials to the inside of the cooker 18–23 . The performance of SBC is evaluated by several parameters, including Performance Characteristics, First and Second figures of merit, Time Boiling, Parameter Index, Standard Cooking Power, cooker optothermal ratio (COR), Thermal efficiency, and Exergy efficiency 24–27 .…”

Performance Evaluation of Various Phase Change Materials for Thermal Energy Storage of A Solar Cooker via Numerical Simulation

“…Singh et al (2015) conducted experimental comparison of different heat transfer fluid to assess thermal performance of a solar cooker. Kanimozhi et al (2015) studied experimentally coconut oil (commercial grade) as phase change material in a box type solar cooker. They found that cooking 1 kg of rice and potato by using PCM cooker took 15 minutes earlier compared with non-PCM cooker.…”