Some Studies on Thermal Performance of Solar Cooking System

Abstract

Solar cooking is an important area of present Indian research scenario. It is high time to find an alternate energy source for highly populated country like India where the demands for energy source has drastically increased for the last two decades. Solar energy is playing a major role in fulfilling the needs of the researchers where people have already started to harvest the free and ample energy source effectively. The needs of thermal energy for cooking in India is huge and people have spent a large amount of thermal energy for cooking. Solar cooking hits even villages of India now a days and many people have already started to utilize the solar energy for cooking. The efficiency of the solar collector plays a vital role in harvesting the free energy effectively; meanwhile the cooking vessels also play a major role in utilizing the heat energy to cook the food efficiently. In this research work, experimental investigation is carried out to study the effectiveness of the solar collector and the thermal efficiency of the cooking vessels. The traditional food of South Indian's like rice and chicken have been cooked with the help of solar cooker on a sunny day at Salem, Tamil Nadu, India. The time taken to cook food along with the effect of solar irradiation is also studied in this research work. Based on the experimental results it is also verified that the recommended cooking time for the chicken, considering food safety, was found to be 80 minutes cooked at an average solar irradiation of 540 W/m2. Time required to cook the different food items have been calculated by means of conventional method and the calculated time was compared with the experimental values. Both the results, well matched each other and finally the solar cooker efficiency is calculated from the deviation of the results as 26.06%.