Design and Experimental Studies of a Funnel Solar Cooker with Phase Change Material

Solar cookers can greatly reduce the overall carbon footprint of the cooking done in India. In the present work a funnel-type solar cooker is designed using cardboard. After making the solar cooker it is then analyzed on the various performance metrics namely the figures of merit, efficiency value and Cooker Opto–thermal Ratio (COR) which are dependent parameters. Paraffin wax which is a phase change material (PCM) is also incorporated in the testing process to evaluate the overall improvement in the thermal efficiency of the solar cooker. The time taken to break is also calculated. The experimental results show that the solar cooker is capable of reaching a temperature of 125 °C. From the results it can also be seen that using paraffin wax also offers significant improvement in the overall thermal efficiency. The results are tested on various parts of India considering the major cities such as Chennai, Trivandrum, Kanpur and Delhi with the ANN model, which is a deep learning model. The advantage of this model is that it can forecast and estimate the temperature of the absorber plate and water from weather forecasting data which is used to calculate F1 and F2 metrics for the performance of the solar cooker. For all the cities, the model’s R2 value is greater than 99% and RMSE values are small.