Abstract:
Biomass fuels, electricity, and fossil fuels are all commonly used as domestic energy sources for
cooking. Cooking is an essential human activity, and the process of baking bread uses a lot more
energy than other cooking activities. This research aims to design, build, and test an indirect solar
thermal bread baking oven for indoor usage. The indirect solar thermal bread baking oven was
designed and built for the experimental test and tested at Bahir Dar Institute of Technology, Bahir
Dar University. The prototype includes a parabolic dish solar collector with a mirror reflector and
a spirally coiled copper receiver, a solar thermal oven, thermal storage (3kg solar salt with a 12%
mass fraction of aluminum chips and a spiral coil heat exchanger tube), an insulated pipeline with
various fittings, an oil storage tank, and a pumping system. During a test, a parabolic dish with a
diameter of 1.9 meters was employed to focus incoming beam radiation over a receiver. The
observed receiver surface temperature during the no-load condition was 616
o
C within 10 minutes.
In the oven heating and baking test, the maximum oil temperatures attained on the receiver outlet
and the oven inlet were 383
o
C and 270.2
o
C, respectively, at a volume flow rate of 0.002 lit/sec.
After 27.2 minutes of heating, the highest temperature inside the oven was 202.8
o
C. The 1.5kg
dough took 52 minutes to bake in the baking test (per bake cycle). The average baking power usage
was about 635.15 watts, with a 73.5% average energy utilization rati o (EUR). After 2 hours of
charging, the maximum temperature of a thermal Storage was 261
o
C, and the estimated useful heat
energy stored by TS was 4711.72kJ (3076.66kJ sensible and 1224kJ latent), with a th ermal
efficiency of 86.7%. A study's overall effici ency of a solar thermal baking system was 30.2 percent.
Assuming two minutes of preheating for the next baking cycle, the system can bake four (4) cycles
per day, including thermal storage charging. The overall efficiency of the indirect solar thermal
baking system can be enhanced by properly designing the components, utilizing a proper oil
pumping system, and using automatic solar tracking mechanisms. As a result, making bread with
solar energy is a viable alternative to using other forms of conventional energy.