Minimal Photovoltaic Solar Cooker for a Catalytic Effect on Energy Poverty

One to four million annual premature deaths are associated with household air pollution. This indoor pollution is mainly generated by traditional biomass cookstoves. Thus, solar cooking can significantly reduce this toll. Its proliferation would also mitigate deforestation pressures. Additionally, for developing countries, it would alleviate the fuel collection workload, mainly borne by women responsible for fuel collection. Electric cooking provides a clean and controllable alternative to thermal cookers for indoor food preparation, sterilization and heating. This study presents a minimal, off-grid photovoltaic solar cooker that operates without batteries and power electronics. Such a cooker constitutes a low-cost and high-reliability solution for electrically decentralized locations. The system encompassing the cooker is conceived as an accessible entry point for household-level photovoltaic (PV) adoption. So, it offers the potential to catalyze the uptake of clean-energy technologies and to support sustainable development. The proposed design dissipates PV power into heat using commercial positive temperature coefficient (PTC) resistors operating near their Curie temperature. A simplified theoretical model is formulated to easily estimate the thermal power and heat-transfer conductances required for achieving cooking temperatures. An instrumented prototype allows for characterizing the transient temperature evolution during controlled heating and cooling experiments in the laboratory, facilitating development in an initial step avoiding the PV panel. The results demonstrate that the minimal PV configuration is technically feasible, robust, and compatible with low-resource settings. This encourages its adoption in communities experiencing energy poverty.