Abstract

One of the big challenges in the solar cooking process is ensuring the completion of cooking process under unexpected reduction in the sunshine due to cloudiness. The popularity of solar cookers is hindered because of the uncertainty in the accomplishment of cooking process, resulting in spoilage of food and wastage of time, leading to inconvenience and loss. The completion of cooking activity certainly requires a definite amount of stored heat at above the cooking temperature and a parameter to provide the related information for design incorporation. Because of the complex nature of the cooking process, the present work considers rice as the food item. In the process, it proposes an alternative to heating based test procedure to determine more realistic value of thermal performance parameter (TPP) for the solar cookers. The relevant parameter is determined utilizing novel cooling test. Two different designs of cookers have been tested to establish the proposal.