Heat transfer analysis for parabolic dish cooker with experimental data by artificial neural

networks approach
S.Lokeswaran1 M.Eswaramoorthy2
1
Centre for Energy and Environmental Science and Technology, National Institute of
Technology, Tiruchirappalli 620015, India.
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Adhiyamaan College of Engineering, Hosur-635109,
India.
1
Email: lokescfd@yahoo.com, Phone: 091- 9095264563

Abstract

This work applied Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for heat transfer analysis of solar cooker
with parabolic dish concentrator. The objective of this study is to predict thermal performance
parameters such as absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures of the experimentally
investigated solar cooker with parabolic dish by using the ANN. Experiment is conducted under
two cases 1) cooker with plain receiver and 2) cooker with porous receiver. The experiment was
conducted for two days on which the data of 16 values taken on first day with plain receiver are
used to train the network and the data of the same number taken on next day with porous receiver
are used to test neural network configurations. The commonly used Back Propagation (BP)
algorithm was used to train and test networks. ANN predictions were compared with
experimental results to evaluate the performance. Prediction of the outlet temperature differences
in each side and overall heat transfer rates were performed. Different network configurations
were also studied by the aid of searching a relatively better network for prediction. The
maximum deviation between the predicted results and experimental data was less than 4%. The
results showed a good regression analysis with the correlation coefficients in the range of
0.9968–0.9992 and mean relative errors (MREs) in the range of 1.2586–4.0346% for the test data
set. Thus ANN model can successfully be used for the prediction of the thermal performance
parameters of parabolic dish cooker with reasonable degree of accuracy.

Keywords: ANN; parabolic dish concentrator; porous medium; metal chips; solar cooker

1 Introduction

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is one of the computational Intelligence (CI) technique,
which have been successfully applied in many scientific researches and engineering practices.
Since ANN offers a new way to simulate nonlinear, or uncertain, or unknown complex system
without requiring any explicit knowledge about input/output relationship widely used in various
application areas such as pattern recognition, system identification and so on. Even though
ANNs have been developed for about two decades, its application in heat transfer is limited.
ANNs have been used in thermal systems for heat transfer analysis, performance prediction and
dynamic control (1-7).

Mohammed et al., (8) designed, constructed, operated and tested a parabolic solar cooker with
automatic two axes sun tracking system was to overcome the need for frequent tracking and
standing in the sun, facing all concentrating solar cookers with manual tracking, and a
programmable logic controller was used to control the motion of the solar cooker. It was also
noticed that the water temperature increases when the ambient temperature gets higher or when
the solar intensity is abundant which is in favor of utilizing this cooker in many developing
countries.

Klemens and maria (9) presented the general types of solar cookers, theirs basic characteristics,
and experimental procedures to test the different types of solar cookers and variables required to
calculate parameters, which are used to compare the thermal performance of the solar cookers.
They also presented a simplified analytical model to design simple cooking systems.
Design of the solar parabolic dish cooker is given in literature (10,11).

Abou-Ziyan (13) designed, constructed and tested two full tracking solar cookers, namely a
parabolic dish solar cooker (PDSC) and a booster mirror solar box cooker (BMSBC) during a
winter season in Cairo (308 N and 308 E). The cookers are made simple, durable and of low cost
and carried out tests to compare the performance of these two cookers under the same operating
conditions. The results showed that the rate of cooking of the PDSC is higher than that of the
BMSBC and also, the PDSC can handle various types of cooking even under the intermittent
sunny and cloudy conditions of the winter.

Patel and Philip (14) tested three solar concentrating type cookers meant for domestic use for
their thermal performance and cooking abilities. They conducted Stagnation temperature, water
heating and cooking tests.

Gaur et al., (15) studied the performance of a solar cooker can be improved if a utensil with a
concave shape lid is used instead of a plain lid. The stagnation temperature for a utensil having a
concave lid was about 2-7% more than the utensil with a normal lid. They found that the time
required for heating the water up to the same temperature in both the utensils was reduced by
about 1-13% when a concave shape lid was used.

But, as per the author’s literature collection, no work have been done on ANN
applied to the solar cooker to predict its thermal performance. Therefore, the
objective of this work is to develop, train and validate an ANN model for parabolic
dish cooker with plain receiver and porous receiver.
 S.No Particular Specifications

1 Aperture diameter 1.3 m

2 Focal length 0.35 m
3 Depth of paraboloid 0.25 m
4 Rim angle 85.42°
5 Arc length 1.47 m
6 Surface area 1.58 m2
7 Concentration ratio 75.11

Table.1.Technical description of the designed parabolic concentrator

2. Materials and methods used:

2.1 Solar parabolic dish collector

Fig. 1. Solar parabolic dish collector.

The solar parabolic dish collector fabricated from series of sectors made of polished aluminum
sheet metal. Figure 1 shows the structure of the parabolic dish concentrator. The design
parameters of the concentrating solar parabolic dish are given in Table 1. Manual tracking
mechanism is used to change the orientation of dish axis parallel to the rays of the sun, so that
bottom of cooking utensil is continuously exposed to the concentrated solar radiation. Tracking
is done at interval of 15 minutes. The maximum temperature can be even above 200°C
depending upon solar irradiance, concentration effect, ambient conditions and the heat load. The
cost of a solar parabolic dish collector may vary from Rs.4500/m2 to Rs.6000/m2 depending on
the material of the dish used and the salient features provided by the manufacturers. The life for
the metallic structure is estimated to be about 20 years. Fig shows the schematic diagram of
parabolic concentrator type solar cooker with porous medium used at the bottom of the cooking
utensil.

2.2 Porous medium

Fig. 2. Cooking utensil with porous medium.

The porous medium used in the experiments was waste metal chips from machining processes
like turning, facing and drilling. Since size of the metal chip is too small in other processes they
are not used. Metals chips made of copper having average size of 1.5 cm length and 0.5-1 mm
thick was used for experiment. Special mounting arrangement was made to mount the porous
medium with cooking utensil. It consists of cylindrical container of diameter equal to the
cooking utensil and height of 8 centimeter made of mild steel sheet metal. This container is filled
with the porous medium up to the height of about 5 centimeter. The cooking utensil is mounted
at the top of the container with the help of the screws provided as shown in Figure 2 this tight fit
provides maximum contact between the porous medium and the cooking utensil, to reduce the
resistance for heat transfer.
2.3 Experimental procedure

The cooking utensil is placed at the focal point of the dish collector, the concentrated solar
radiation strikes on the bottom of surface of the cooking utensil. The heat is conducted to the
cooking grains through the walls of utensil. The receiver plate temperature, water temperature,
solar radiation are noted Manual tracking is done for interval of 15 minutes to expose the
receiver surface continuously to capture the concentrated solar radiation on the surface of vessel.
Three thermocouples were used at the centre, top of the utensil and another at the bottom of the
hot receiver plate to monitor the temperature of water, air and plate respectively. Same procedure
is repeated for cooker with porous medium. Total solar radiation on the horizontal plane is also
monitored simultaneously at pre-fixed interval of 15 minutes using the pyranometer. The
experiment was conducted on December 30th to 31th, 2010.

3. Neural network configuration

Fig. 3. The architecture of ANN used for this study.

ANNs consists of number of neurons that are interconnected to each other. Fig. 3 illustrates an
example for full-connected network configuration. ANN consists of a series of layers and
number of nodes or neurons on each layer. The nodes (circle points in Fig. 3) are the basic
processors of neural network. Each connection between two nodes with a real value is called
weight. For each node, there exist activation and a bias associated with it. Among various types
of ANNs, the feed forward or multilayer perception neural network is widely used in engineering
applications. In this network the input information is propagated forward through the network,
while the output error is back propagated through the network for updating the weights. The first
layer with four nodes and last layer with three nodes are called input layer and output layer
respectively, while the others in the middle are called hidden layers. Number of hidden layers
depends on the nature and complexity of the problem.
The number of neurons in the hidden layer depends on the number of input and output
parameters and number of training data set. Getting the right number of hidden neurons is a
matter of trial and error however there is an empirical formula, which has been used in a number
of engineering problems for modeling and prediction with very good results (1).

1
Number of hidden neurons = ( inputs + outputs ) + number of training patterns
2

Application of the ANN on the experimental data

Table 1
The network performance with various neuron numbers in the hidden layer

Number of neurons MRE (%) R2

in the hidden layer
4 The training process cannot be realized
5
6 2.0260 0.9992
7 2.3745 0.9986
8 2.1278 0.9989
9 2.4527 0.9982
10 2.5416 0.9979

The ANN parameter values such as learning rate, momentum coefficient and number of neurons
in the hidden layer are chosen with respect to minimum sum squared errors (SSE). The feed
forward neural network structure was used in this study, which included an input layer, a hidden
layer and an output layer, as shown schematically in Fig. 3. The number of the neurons in the
input layer is equal to the number of input parameters and the number of the neurons in the
output layer is equal to the number of output parameters. The number of neurons in the hidden
layer depends on the number of input and output parameters and number of training data set.

The BP training algorithm is a gradient descent algorithm, which tries to improve the
performance of the network by minimizing the total error by changing the weights along its
gradient. Training was halted when the testing set of sum squared errors (SSE) value stopped
decreasing and started to increase, which is an indication of over training. The prediction
performances of the networks were evaluated using the SSE, the statistical coefficient of multiple
determination or correlation coefficients (R2) and mean relative error (MRE) values, which were
calculated by the following expressions:
n 2

SSE = ∑ ( d i − oi )
i =1
 SSE
R2 = 1−
∑
n 2
i =1
Oi
1 n  d − Oi 
MRE (%) = ∑ 100 × i
n i =1  di



where di is the desired or actual value, Oi is the network output or predicted value, n is the
number of output data (2).

7 Results and Discussion

In current study, the ANN model is developed and used to predict the absorber plate, enclosure
air and pot water temperatures of a box type solar cooker without/with reflector conditions. The
predictions of the trained ANN for the absorber plate (Tp), enclosure air (Ta) and pot water
temperatures (Tw) of the solar cooker for 0.25, 0.5 and 1 liters of water as a function of the
experimental ones are shown in Figs. 4 and 5 with plain and porous receiver conditions for the
training data set.

The accuracy of the ANN predictions, are shown in Fig. in which each graph is provided with a
straight line indicating the perfect prediction. All of the prediction errors for the training data set
are inside the ±5% error band.

Regression analysis between the predicted and the experimental values is used to evaluate the
performance of the neural network prediction. In general the correlation coefficient (R2) and
mean relative error (MRE) of the regression analysis parameters were considered as accurate
enough for the prediction of ANN model. The ANN predictions yield correlation coefficients in
the range of 0.9998–0.9999 and mean relative errors (MREs) in the range of 0.4210–1.3562% for
the training data set, as shown in the Table 3, which are within an acceptable range.

Figs. 6 and 7 shows the comparison of the ANN predicted and experimentally measured
temperatures values for testing data set with plain receiver and porous receiver conditions
respectively. Randomly selected experimental data set which was not introduced to the network
during the training process are used to predict the performance of the network and compared.

Table 3
Statistical results of the training data set
With plain receiver With porous receiver
MRE(%) R2 MRE (%) R2
Tp 0.3154 0.9992 .4526 0.9999
Ta 0.6425 0.9996 .8782 0.9996
Tw 0.8945 0.9990 1.1246 0.9998

Table 4
Statistical results of the testing data set
With plain receiver With porous receiver
 MRE(%) R2 MRE (%) R2
Tp 3.1544 0.9987 3.9854 0.9975
Ta 1.2586 0.9980 4.0346 0.9968
Tw 2.7821 0.9992 3.1546 0.9979

The ANN predictions versus experimentally measured values for the absorber plate, enclosure
air and pot water temperatures to train the network are shown in Fig. 6. The ANN prediction and
experimental values for these temperatures yield correlation coefficients of 0.9987, 0.9982,
0.9980 and MREs of 4.148, 3.925,4.185% respectively, as shown in Table 4.

The ANN predictions for the absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures with
reflector as a function of the experimental values are shown in Fig. 7. For predicting these
temperatures of the solar cooker with reflector, the ANN yields correlation coefficients of
0.9968, 0.9950, 0.9970 and MREs of 5.008, 7.040, 5.182% respectively, as shown in Table 4.
 Fig. 4. Comparison of experimentally measured and ANN-predicted values of
absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures for the training data set.

Although these results calculated from the solar cooker with reflector case are poorer than
previous results for the solar cooker without reflector, the regression coefficients obtained from
testing of the ANN were extremely good and within the acceptable limits in both cases with and
without reflector. As the correlation coefficient approaches to 1, the accuracy of the prediction
improves. In the presented case, the correlation coefficients range is very close to 1, which
indicates excellent agreement between the experimental and the ANN predicted results.

Figures also show another prediction performance measurement that is ±10% error band based
on error analysis, respectively. All of the temperatures prediction errors for the test data set are
inside the ±10% error band. While the prediction errors for training data set are inside the ±5%
error band, they are inside the ±10% error band for test data set.

A comparison of the experimental and ANN predicted the temperature results of the solar
cooker with and without reflector for 0.25, 0.5 and 1 liters of water are shown in Figs. 8 and 9. It
can be seen that both predicted results are well close to the corresponding experimental results.
Deviations between experimental and predicted results are very small and negligible for each
temperatures of solar cooker.
 Fig. 4. Comparison of experimentally measured and ANN-predicted values of
absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures for the testing data set.
 Fig. 4. Comparison of experimentally measured and ANN-predicted values of
absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures with porous receiver for the testing data
set.
 Fig. 4. Comparison of experimentally measured and ANN-predicted values of
absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures for the testing data set.

8 Conclusion

In the present study, an experimental system for investigation on performance of solar parabolic
dish collector is set up, and limited experimental data is obtained. The ANN is applied to predict
thermal performance parameters such as absorber plate, enclosure air and pot water temperatures
of the experimentally investigated solar parabolic dish cooker for different quantity of water on
the solar radiation intensity, ambient temperature, quantity of water and time as hour. Back
propagation algorithm is used which has a one hidden layer and 4–8–3 neurons configuration to
train and test the network. It is shown that the predicted results are close to experimental data by
ANN approach, indicating that ANN technique is a suitable tool for use in the prediction of
thermal performance of parabolic dish cooker. The correlation coefficient (R2) and mean relative
error (MRE) are used to evaluate the performance of the ANN prediction and its accuracy
compared to the experimental results. The neural network predicted the temperatures of solar
cooker within ±4% error. The results showed a good regression analysis with the correlation
coefficients in the range of 0.9968–0.9992 and mean relative errors (MREs) in the range of
1.2586–4.0346% for the test data set.

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