A comprehensive review of contemporary developments in cooking vessel design for sustainable solar cooking: Emphasis on economic feasibility and CO2 mitigation potential

The depletion of fossil fuels and the impacts of climatic changes drive humanity towards renewable energy sources. Being abundant, solar energy has become appropriate for various contemporary applications. Cooking, necessary for human sustenance, consumes significant energy globally in both residential and commercial settings. Traditional cooking methods, reliant on fossil fuels, have created unhealthy living conditions by increasing CO2 emissions in developing and underdeveloped regions. In contrast, solar cookers promote clean energy for cooking. Aiming at sustainable development, recent advancements have been made in the geometries of solar cookers (both direct and indirect), vessel configurations, heat collection methods, and energy storage mechanisms (both sensible and latent heat materials) to enable faster and superior cooking quality. Previous reviews have collectively summarized the various modification techniques adopted in cooker components for the performance enhancement of the solar cooker. The present review focuses exclusively on cooking vessel design modifications in solar cookers developed over the past decade. It delves into the technological, economical, environmental and social aspects of contemporary solar cooking vessel configurations over conventional ones. Finally, the review provides recommendations for future work that can act as guidance for solar cooker researchers, benefiting component manufacturers of solar cookers and fulfilling end-user requirements, thus leading to broader adoption of solar cookers.