Cooking food with a solar PV-powered DC stove

Abstract

An experimental setup to evaluate a new 12 V DC-powered electrical cooker is presented. The DC cooker is powered by a 450 W solar panel connected to a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) charge controller and a 12 V AGM 100 AH deep cycle battery. The cooking tests are performed when the DC cooker and the pot containing food are placed in a closed-insulating wonderbag cooker to reduce heat losses. Four different food cooking tests are carried out during different times of the day to evaluate the cooking performance of the system. The cooking tests are boiling rice at night, boiling eggs during midday, preparing chicken and turkey stew after midday, and frying chicken late in the afternoon. All foods are well cooked within 90 minutes, and the food that takes the longest time to cook is rice because the energy from the battery is solely used to cook the food. For all tests, the electrical cooking powers are comparable, implying that the system can be used at any time of the day which is better than existing solar cookers which operate optimally only under high solar radiation conditions. There is also no need to include an inverter since the cooker operates in DC mode.