Box type solar cooker with thermal storage: an overview

The majority of the world's population still cooks using biofuels like wood, agricultural leftovers, and dried animal dung, which lacks the ability to cook efficiently, predictably, safely, and most importantly cleanly. There is an urgent need to develop an alternate, acceptable, hygienic, and low-cost method of cooking, which can be met by Box type Solar Cooker (BSC) due to its compact form and low-cost attributes. But its inability to cook during off-peak hours makes it difficult to adopt as an alternative cooking technique. To address this issue, thermal storage is added to the system to provide heat during off-peak hours which is well addressed in earlier literature. This paper tries to make an overview on box type solar cooking with heat storage unit based on earlier experimental and analytical research studies. This review provides information about the frequently used materials as heat storage, also different technical-economical-social aspects of BSC are discussed to point out the problem associated with its widespread acceptance.