Published Paper Details:

Food is the basic requirement for human being but raw form of food is not suitable for the consumption. Hence, need to cook a raw food with higher nutritional value but conventional cooking leads to environmental pollution as well as food with lower nutritional value. Solar energy is the best alternative to cook a food with higher nutritional value and it is available in abundance. The most economical, effective and simple way to utilize the solar energy for domestic purpose is solar cooking. Solar cookers are the most convenient and extensively used for cooking the food. Numerous types and designs of solar cookers are available at present. But due to the higher cooking time cycle and less effective during the cloudy weather and off-sunshine hours, the solar cookers are not popular in regular cooking or spreaded worldwide application. Thermal energy storage is essential whenever there is a mismatch between the supply and consumption of energy. Latent heat storage in a phase change material is very attractive because of its high storage density with small temperature swing. The choice of PCM plays an important role in addition to heat transfer mechanism in the PCM. Hence, the present review emphasis on the performance of solar cookers with the aid of thermal energy storage material. The possibility and performance of cooking during off sunshine hours using PCMs as storage media are collected in this study.