Solar cooking experiments with a finned heat storage cooking pot

Solar storage cooking pots can use stored heat for cooking during non-sunshine periods to enhance their usefulness during non-sunshine hours. A finned-type solar cooking storage pot is designed and evaluated experimentally. The storage cooking pot is designed with a finned storage cavity to store heat during sunshine cooking periods. Sunflower oil is used as the storage medium inside the cavity with a capacity of 4 litres. The solar cooking pot is heated up during solar cooking periods with a 1.8 m parabolic dish concentrator. During storage cooking periods, the pot is placed in a wonderbag insulating cooker to investigate the storage performance. Sunflower oil and water are used as the cooking loads. For both solar and storage cooking periods, 1 kg of water/sunflower oil is used as the load. The solar and storage cooking periods are both 3 hours. 1 kg of water is boiled in 30 minutes, and all the water in the pot is fully evaporated after around 2.5 hours. The maximum temperature achieved by sunflower oil in the storage cavity is about 134 °C during the solar cooking period using water as the load. For sunflower oil as the load during the solar cooking period, the maximum temperatures achieved in the pot and storage cavity are around 188 °C and 190 °C, respectively, at the end of 3 hours. For the storage cooking period, fresh water poured into the pot achieves a maximum temperature of around 85 °C in about 30 minutes. The load temperature is around 70 °C at the end of the storage cooking period. For the oil heating test, fresh sunflower oil in the pot achieves a maximum temperature of 150 °C in about 20 mins. The cooking temperature drops to around 120 °C at the end of the storage cooking period. Higher temperatures are achieved with sunflower oil as the load compared to water. The pot is also evaluated with chicken, and it can fry chicken during both solar and storage cooking periods.