Harnessing the sun for smoke-free kitchens: Appraisal of existing systems and inventive design suggestions for broader acceptance and versatility

Abstract

Food is vital for human existence, supplying the energy and nutrients for daily activities and overall health. A significant proportion of the population in most developing countries relies on polluting fuels (firewood, animal dung, and agriculture waste) for daily cooking energy needs, which causes household air pollution. Adoption of clean cooking fuels is necessary to prevent health hazards (respiratory and cardiovascular diseases) due to household air pollution. Solar energy (clean energy) can address these challenges appropriately, but its limited acceptance as a cooking fuel is observed. In the present study, a detailed appraisal of the existing solar cooking systems is performed to understand the barriers to disseminating solar cooking practices among the people. The study thoroughly discusses the techno-economic, environmental, and social barriers to the wide-scale acceptability of solar cookers. Based on this comprehensive evaluation, the study presents an innovative design of a versatile indoor solar cooking system that can cook any food at any time, with complete process control, which is impossible in existing solar cooking technologies. Analysis-driven inventive design ideas have been discussed for the collection, storage, and utilization of solar energy for the proposed cooking system. The existing cooking system designs do not support most cooking applications, such as baking, frying, and boiling. Therefore, this study presents state-of-the-art cooking unit designs that can facilitate all major cooking processes. Experimental investigations are performed on the developed cooking units for various cooking applications. It is observed that the cooking units can cook various types of food in a time comparable to conventional cookstoves, i.e., boiling 500 g of potatoes, frying 80 g of potato chips, and baking a 60-gram chapati (an Indian flatbread) are completed in 13 min, 4 min, and 3 min, respectively. The experimental findings highlight the effectiveness and potential of the developed cooking units for integration into the proposed versatile indoor solar cooking system.