Development and performance evaluation of a solar baking oven

Abstract

The majorities of rural people in Ethiopia have low access to electricity and depend almost completely on biomass fuels traditionally. Traditional and inefficient burning of biomass fuels for cooking has an adverse effect on both human health and the global climate. Solar energy could be an alternative even though it cannot replace biomass completely. This work has focused on developing a solar baking oven and aimed to shorten the long cooking time in existing box type solar cookers by employing additional parabolic reflecting element under the box to gain additional heat input. The solar oven is designed for a baking purpose since most Ethiopian cultural foods require continuous whisking or stir during cooking which is not comfortable with solar cookers. The maximum absorber pipe temperature is found to be 121.1 °C and the first figure of merit (F1) is calculated to be 0.1204. The baking test was done to evaluate the baker actual performance and the quality of the bread by placing row bread in the baking tray inside the absorber rectangular pipe. The performances of the baker demonstrated that these devices can play a role in combating domestic energy problem, mainly in rural areas.