Technomics of renewable energy based hybrid community cooking system

Abstract

International Energy Agency (IEA) carried out an energy survey of 5 top most nations between the years 2012-2017. In this survey IEA studied the world energy statistics and stated that 18% of the total energy consumption at home accounts for heating water for various purposes. The increasing gap between energy demand and its availability has envisaged the need for search of alternative sources of energy. Renewable energy sources can play a vital role in fulfilling the energy requirements of the people throughout the world. The majority of thermal energy and electric power is generated through non-renewable sources of energy like coal, gas and nuclear power, which are costly as well as degrade earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Renewable energy sources derive their energy from the existing natural energy such as sun, wind, flowing water, biological processes, and geothermal heat which are almost free of charge. And using alternative renewable sources for generation of energy will save our earth and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Due to the increasing demand of energy, at times an individual renewable energy based system cannot fulfill the demand of required energy within the required time frame. If one system is insufficient to utilize this ample amount of radiations efficiently, one or more efficient systems can be connected in series for a single application. In other words hybrid systems can extract more energy from the renewable source compared to single system. In present work, a hybrid cooking system was designed by integrating solar water heater (SWH), heat pipe (HP), biogas and wood based boiler (auxiliary system) to decrease dependency on conventional energy sources like coal, LPG etc. At present, almost all community cooking systems use LPG as the prime energy source for cooking. This research work focused on transferring LPG based cooking system to renewable energy based hybrid cooking system. Heat required for boiling rice, pulses and green vegetables per day was calculated for 400 persons in community mess. As per the heat requirement a hybrid cooking system was designed and evaluated for its performance. An attempt was also made to reduce wood consumption in the boiler of hybrid cooking systems and to make the system efficient enough so that it can replace the conventional fuel (LPG) for cooking.