Concentrating solar cookers in urban areas: Establishing usefulness through realistic intermediate temperature rating and grading

Abstract

Concentrating Solar Cookers (CSCs) are well-known for fast cooking and can significantly contribute to attaining the United Nation’s sustainable development goals. CSCs attain intermediate temperatures (120–240 °C) and are suitable for several cooking applications. The realistic rating and grading of CSCs is inevitable for establishing their usefulness in urban areas, which is the main objective of the present work. This paper reveals the experimental results of two existing concentrating solar cookers with different geometries and aperture areas. The first cooker is a shallow satellite antenna parabolic dish, and the other is a small deep parabola. Cooker Opto-thermal Ratio (COR) acts as a thermal performance parameter, and glycerin as a test load for their performance evaluation.The mean values of COR for the cookers, CSC1, and CSC3, are 0.180 and 0.092, respectively. The typical theoretical values of maximum achievable fluid temperature are 192.9 and 113.9 °C, respectively, and that for reference time are 23.8 and 60.5 min for CSC1 and CSC3, respectively. COR identifies the variation in the performance of CSCs based on a design change. The objective parameters enable realistic intra-cooker performance comparison of the CSCs at intermediate temperatures. The results depict that the existing designs of CSCs can be graded appropriately using COR and provide new insights into their performance at intermediate temperatures realistically. TPP-based realistic rating and grading of existing designs of solar cookers enable their effortless selection as per end-user requirements and help in the faster propagation of solar cooking technology in urban and semi-urban areas.