Design and Development of a Solar Box Cooker cum Temperature Controlled Solar Energy Container using Phase Change Materials for rural and semi-urban areas. Share

Project Objectives: Solar energy has gained importance in the current global discussions on energy and environment. As the world becomes more environmental conscious, there is a rising concern on deforestation and finding renewable energy options to fossil fuels. Today, every country is taking huge steps to promote the use of renewable energy especially solar energy. As the space for solar energy is easily and cheaply available in rural and semi-urban areas, solar energy can be best utilized as well.  Among the different energy end uses, energy for cooking is one of the basic and dominant end uses in developing countries. Now a day, growing awareness for the use of renewable energy along with the increasing prices of non-renewable energy drives the solar cooker market. Hence a lot of research initiatives and promotional schemes are required for successful commercialization of solar cookers as a substitute for conventional cooking devices. From past researches, it is clear that every element of solar cooker has great importance and direct effects on the performance of cooker in any climate conditions. It is necessary to optimize the various major parameters such as geometries of box, absorber plate, glazing system, cooking vessel design, heat storage, mirror boosters and financial feasibility of box type solar cooker. The use of a box type solar cooker is limited because cooking of food is not possible due to frequent clouds in the day or in the evening. If storage of solar energy can be provided in a solar cooker, then there is a possibility of cooking food during clouds or in the evening and storage will increase the utility and reliability of the solar cookers. Phase Change Materials (PCM) has a property that the temperature becomes constant throughout the process of phase change ie melting or solidification. The constant temperature retained during solidification is utilized in designing and developing of temperature controlled solar energy container. Accordingly, the main aim of the project proposal is to design, optimize, develop and test a novel solar cooker cum temperature controlled solar energy container using Phase Change Materials (PCM). Through the project work, it is planned to carry out experimental and numerical analysis on the performance of a novel concept based solar cooker cum   constant temperature hot container by taken into account all the above factors.

          Principal Investigator: Dr. Ranjith M

        Co- Principal Investigator: :Dr. Anish S

Principal Investigator : Dr. Ranjith M | Contact : mranji1@nitk.edu.in

Project Status :

Funded By :

Estimated Budget : 5,00,000