Design Optimization of a Solar Cooker and Feasibility Analysis for Uttarakhand

Abstract

Noticeably that the People from the hilly regions or remote locations commonly used fuel wood or other residues for their cooking and heating demands especially the lower income household families due to non-accessibility of clean fuels for such prime activities. They generally spend their time for collection of the fuel-wood for their heating and cooking demands from nearby forests. These bio-based cooking fuels releases a lot of pollutants while firing. These low-quality cooking fuels attacks directly on their users which results in very harmful diseases especially women and children. On the other side, the limited fossil fuels got a higher reduction daily on mountains or likely region. Therefore, there is an urgent need of a clean and economic solution which should fulfill the demands of the people from such locations at least for cooking. newline newlineIn the present work, by keeping this fact in mind a low cost but highly efficient solar hot box cooker is designed and developed. About the novelty of the tested cooker than an approach of extended geometries over the flat surface and encapsulated phase change materials has been applied to the new cooker. This has been achieved through some small size aluminium made cylindrical capsules and by incorporating the PCM in the same capsules. Extended geometry (small capsules) has improved the heat transfer rate inside the tested cooker while PCM provided an extended thermal stability to the new designed cooker. Consequently, that s why there are two different configurations have been developed for cooking trails. Results shows that third configuration is the best among all the tested configurations due encapsulated phase change material. The thermal efficiency is found about 53.1% and cooking power is found about 56.2 W, on this configuration. newline newlineFeasibility analysis for the Uttarakhand region is in a great favour of adoption of the present design of solar cooker for round the year cooking. Payback period is estimated about the 4.41 years. newline newline