Solar Powered Heat Storage for Injera Baking

Abstract

Ethiopia with a population of about 85 million meets 96% of its energy needs with bio-mass, charcoal, wood, animal dung and plant residues. More than 50% of this energy goes entirely on baking Injera. Injera the national food of the country demands 180-220 °C to be well cooked. In this article; Injera baking with solar energy on off-focus system, status of electric powered stove and the potential for solar powered stoves is discussed. The research and development of solar thermal for household energy consumption has not been well developed and adopted. One reason for this is that the system can only be used outdoor and at time of sun shine. In addition to the off-focus solar thermal application this paper discussed the integration of solar thermal with heat storage for a sustainable future use. The prototype for direct steam based baking was developed and tested in Mekelle University (Ethiopia) and Phase change material based heat storage prototype was developed and tested at NTNU. Both experiments showed the possibility of solar energy for Injera baking and its sustainability by including latent heat storage. This research gave hope to break the bottleneck related with on- focus solar cookers