Conventional cooking relies on biomass and fossil fuels that burn inefficiently and emit particulate matter and harmful gases. These emissions create health risks, increase time burdens, and expose households to fuel-price volatility. Solar cooking avoids fuel combustion at the point of use and can reduce household emissions to near zero. However, practical adoption is limited by poor controllability and the inability to cook after sunset. Thermal energy storage using phase change materials (PCMs) addresses this limitation by shifting collected solar heat to off-sun cooking hours.Selecting an appropriate PCM requires more than high latent heat. The material must melt near the cooking setpoint and provide adequate thermal conductivity, cycling stability, chemical compatibility, food safety, acceptable cost, and low environmental impact. This study presents a structured preselection and ranking of candidate PCMs for the thermal energy storage unit of a concentrated indirect solar cooker. Materials are first screened based on melting temperature to match the operating window of the cooker. An entropy-weighted multi-criteria decision-making framework is then applied using TOPSIS, VIKOR, and COPRAS. The evaluation includes thermophysical performance, durability, compatibility, safety, economic feasibility, and sustainability. Robustness is examined through weight-perturbation tests, criterion-omission trials, and normalization checks. The rankings remain stable, with changes limited to mid-ranked materials. TOPSIS and VIKOR identify high-density polyethylene as the leading candidate, while COPRAS favors erythritol due to its strong thermal attributes. To address practical significance, an experiment-anchored thermal validation is conducted. A system-level energy-balance discharge model is calibrated using measured no-PCM and magnesium chloride hexahydrate discharge data. The validated model confirms that the shortlisted PCMs can sustain cooking-relevant temperatures under identical system constraints without altering the decision ranking.Considering thermal performance together with safety, compatibility, cost, and deployability, high-density polyethylene is recommended as the most suitable PCM for the thermal energy storage unit of an indirect concentrated solar cooker.
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