International Journal of Energy Research (Journal)

Description

Design and performance evaluation of solar cookers for application in Developing Countries: the case of Mutoyi, Burundi

In Developing Countries, the exploiting of firewood in low efficiency cooking devices has a ruinous impact on human health and environment. Solar cookers may mitigate the aforementioned problems. To determine their appropriateness, it is essential to evaluate their performance with respect to the local habits.We propose in this work an approach for designing and evaluating the performance of solar cooking technologies, to assess their eventual appropriateness for remote rural contexts, before proposing them for local field tests. The approach is based on (i) a local context description and analysis, the
(ii) design and construction of the solar cookers and (iii) thermodynamic performance evaluation.We employed the approach to analyse three cookers for the area of Mutoyi, Burundi: a parabolic, a panel and a box cooker. From phases (i) and (ii) only Panel and Box Cookers emerged as the technically viable solutions: they were sized, optimized, built and tested. In phase (iii) the thermodynamic evaluation indicated that the Box Cooker is inappropriate, since water does not reach high enough temperature. Instead, the Panel Cooker shows a Standardized Cooking Power of 46.85W and a temperature of stagnation higher than 75°C, which is able to bring the water to the boil when the environmental temperature is higher than 25°C.

The results of the procedure applied to the case study indicate the Panel Cooker can be proposed for local field tests with local food and cooking practices, for assessing its final appropriateness on the field.

Period	22 Jun 2016 → 23 Jul 2016
Type of journal	Journal
ISSN	0363-907X
Degree of Recognition	International