Design, construction and testing of hybrid solar-biomass cook stove

Abstract

Many investigations have been conducted in biomass stoves to improve performances and minimize unfavorable effect on both human health and global climate. Solar cookers are also great area of investigation which can cook food without burning any wood. But a solar cooker cannot replace the traditional energy source completely; even in the sunniest regions there will be days and hours the sun doesn’t provide enough power to cook meal. Recent researches and investigations are focused on improving the efficiency of existing only biomass or only solar cookers and there is a research gap in combining solar and biomass for cooking. A combined cook stove is another research dimension for intervention with an intention of using the benefit of the free solar energy to save biomass fuel. In this work, design, fabrication, and testing of portable solar-biomass combined cook stove have been done. The test was done by using only biomass, only solar and combined energy sources for cooking. The results show that the biomass stove with reflectors under the sun gives a 5% thermal efficiency rise and 6 g/L reduction in fuel consumption when compared to the only biomass stove. When only solar box oven used the first figure of merit was found to be 0.12 and second figure of merit found to be 0.55.