Photovoltaic and Thermal Hybridized Solar Cooker

The objective of the present research work is to design user friendly solar cooker which can be commercialized too. This cooker is designed, developed, and tested in our laboratory. The basic principle is to incorporate heating into material by photovoltaic effect and thermal treatment. Different temperatures inside the solar cooker were measured and profile of solar cooker was studied for several days during April, May, and June 2012. It is observed that the designed cooker needs the boosting of only 30 watt power which is generated by a small solar panel connected with it. Heater connected with it can be powered by a solar panel of 75 watt. This boosting can reduce the cooking time. Different recipes were prepared to test its actual performance. 1. Introduction Food is one of the basic needs like water and air. Food preparation requires a fuel which may be wood, coal, cow dung, liquid petroleum gas, and electricity consuming induction heaters or microwave. Availability of these nonrenewable sources is a burning task. Moreover, it produces pollution which leads to imbalance in the nature. Solar cooker either box type or concentrating type can be one of the solutions of this critical problem. The solar cookers available in national and international market are not as popular as they should be. The objective of our research is to design user-friendly solar cooker which can cook a little faster than the conventional box type solar cooker for more than 300 days per year. The electrically boosted heater has made it 24 hours usable cooker. 2. Materials and Methods Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of Photo-Thermo solar cooker. Photo-Thermo solar cooker was constructed using a stainless steel casserole and a DC heater. The heater was fixed inside the casserole with screws. Stainless still pot was used for cooking in the casserole while aluminum pots were used in Star and GEDA cookers. Figure 1: Schematic diagram of Photo-Thermo solar cooker. The Photo-Thermo solar cooker is a photovoltaic and thermal hybridized solar cooker. It is connected to a 12 volt 40 ampere-hour battery. This battery will be charged by a solar panel of 75？watt. To decide the minimum requirement of wattage for cooking, we operated the cooker with a power supply. This testing was indoor testing under all controlled parameters like wind, ambient temperatures, and humidity, and so forth. The insolation and ambient temperature data were given by Sardar Patel Renewable Energy Institute, SPRERI, situated at Gujarat, India. Horizontal insolation was recorded by pyranometer with ±2% accuracy.