Design, fabrication and performance assessment of a solar cooker with optimum composition of heat storage materials

Abstract

Solar energy as an inexhaustible source of energy has been the primary interest of many researchers for the last four to five decades due to its wide applications such as domestic cooking systems. The current work aims to determine the optimum cooker surface area with the aid of analytical heat loss and design equations. The top, bottom and side heat loss coefficients are calculated by an iterative procedure solved using MATLAB. Also, it seeks to obtain the performance parameters of a solar cooker having sensible heat storage materials. For an anticipated average solar irradiation of 800 W/m2 and for boiling 1.5 kg mass of water, the cooker surface area is found to be 0.36 m2 and fabricated accordingly. Also, in this study, iron grits, sand, brick powder and charcoal powder are taken in the optimum ratio (mass) of 1:2:2:3 respectively as heat storage material. The performance indicators namely first and second figures of merit (F1 and F2), thermal and exergy efficiency are found to be 0.085, 0.319, 16.1% and 0.61% respectively. It is found that water temperature in the developed thermal energy storage incorporated solar cooker is maintained above 70 °C until 6 PM in a day. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.