DESIGN AND TESTING OF COOKING VESSELS OF SOLAR BOX COOKER FOR EVENING COOKING

In the present work, an attempt has been made to design and test the performance of box type solar cooker with cooking pots of different materials filled with latent heat energy storage mediums to perform the cooking in sun shine and off sun - shine conditions. The box type solar cookers are not common in use due to limited availability of solar energy. Latent heat energy storage materials are used to store solar energy available in day time to use in evening and off sunshine hours. Paraffin wax is used as energy storage material (PCM) to improve the performance of the system in off sunshine conditions. PCM filled aluminium pots are suitable for day time cooking. It is observed from full load test that the water temperature in PCM filled steel pots are maintained above 950C for more than 3 hours than PCM filled aluminium pots in off sunshine conditions