Indoor Solar Thermal Cook Stove Design

Cooking with local clean energy resources ensures breathable clean indoor air, reducing respiratory illnesses and adverse impacts on the environment caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Harvesting solar energy for domestic applications is comparably economical in the long term since it is free, renewable, clean, and richly available, in tropical countries. The proposed design is deviated from other types of solar cookers as it enables indoor cooking without having to be in direct sunlight, even in night and rainy weather. The proposed design was simulated, fabricated, and tested for its performance by boiling water. The main components of the system are solar collectors, a thermal storage, a cooking stove, a heat-carrying fluid, and a control panel. It is designed to have a comparable performance to the conventional stoves by considering different designs, including a spiral coil and a maze pattern plate. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using the Ansys software were conducted to compare the thermal behavior with existing stoves, and the design that closely matched was selected for prototype testing. A control panel was used to change the heating level as required and indicate the available solar cooking time in minutes based on the condition of the thermal storage.