Design Fabrication and Performance Evaluation of Solar Oven

Solar oven is a device which uses the energy of sunlight for cooking, heating, roasting, pasteurizing etc., Different types of solar ovens and cookers are developed over years, mainly box type ovens, panel type and parabolic dish types. Among all the types box type is more popular because of its simplicity of handling and operation. Referring to the different collector design, it has been concluded that box type is better when compared to cost and compound parabolic collectors are better when compared with cooking time. Here a new design of a solar oven has been developed using a parabolic trough collector and an evacuated borosilicate glass tube. It has a wide range of application such as cooking, distillation, roasting etc., due to its unique property of producing a very high temperature of around 250ï‚°C. The parabolic glass tube type solar oven was designed, fabricated using locally available materials and the thermal performance was evaluated. The solar oven was tested for different conditions such as under load condition of 2.5Kg of water for with and without reflectors and under no load condition with an empty tube for with and without reflectors. Temperature of 90-95ï‚°C was obtained within 90 minutes under loading condition and a maximum temperature of around 234ï‚°C was achieved under no load condition in 60 minutes. Cooking power, Stagnation temperature, and the thermal efficiency of the solar oven was determined.