Development of a solar thermal storage cum cooking device using salt hydrate

In family size solar cookers commercially available in India, cooking has to be done outdoors during sunshine hours. Some solar cookers for community cooking provide thermal storage facility as steam, while the small scale cookers do not provide thermal storage. A concentrating type solar cooker using magnesium chloride hexahydrate (m.p. = 118 °C) as the thermal storage material was designed for boiling type of cooking. The developed device was able to store a charge of heat in about 50 min and cook about 140 gm of rice in 30 min from the stored heat.