Abstract

This study focuses on concentrating solar cookers, especially dish-type solar cookers, the theory of their different designs, including fabricating material characteristics of their essential elements, in-depth thermodynamic assessment, the significance of heat transfer fluids, and phase change materials to find out the optimum configuration, and the importance of these critical elements. So, a design engineer can easily design and assess its thermal performance and recommend it for different communities. Besides this, performance enhancement techniques are noteworthy, but the thermal performance assessment of the applied technique (for performance improvement) is worth the technology development. Thus, this factor is considered in this work in detail. It has been observed that design and ambient parameters significantly affect the thermal performance of solar cookers. However, design elements and performance parameters have their importance. Still, energy and exergy analysis, cooker opto-thermal ratio, figures of merit, thermal efficiency, and heat transfer coefficient have been observed as the most important performance parameters in assessing the thermal performance of a solar cooker to rate it. Remarkably, A well-designed dish cooker can cook 3 to 5 dishes on a sunny day at any location. Finally, this review article is a gateway for students, researchers, scholars, and industrialists to design different dish cookers by selecting adequate fabrication materials and their complete thermodynamic assessment with and without any modification. This study provides essential information for anyone interested in solar cooking using concentrating cookers, offering a comprehensive assessment of the thermal performance of a concentrating cooker on a single platform.