Solar cookers for outdoors and indoors

The solar cooking process has been investigated to develop safe, simple, portable, and reliable solar cookers. The concept of insulated and vapor-tight pots has been introduced and applied to oven, point-focus and heat-pipe cookers. A new, flat-plate cooker with heat pipes has been developed. It requires no tracking and allows cooking to be done in the shade or indoors. Also, a novel-portable cooker, the Mina Oven, featuring a vapor-tight pot and an integral collector with reflector flaps, has been constructed and tested. A second portable cooker that has been developed is the Arafa Cooker, which comprises a parabolic dish focused at a glazed and insulated receiver. Experiments indicated that all cookers yielded satisfactory performance, with cooking times of 25–45 min per kg of food per m² of solar collection area while operating from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.