Int. J. Energy Technology and Policy, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2009 201 Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Experimental investigations and comparison of energy and exergy efficiencies of the box type and Solar Parabolic Cooker Nitesh Rathore and S.K. Shukla* Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi – 221005, India E-mail: rathore.nitesh302@gmail.com E-mail: skshukla.mec@itbhu.ac.in *Corresponding author Abstract: In this paper two different types of solar cookers namely simple box-type and parabolic solar cooker with its focus inside cooker, is investigated experimentally. Experiments were done at roof top of Renewable Energy Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi, India. For comparison, these two cookers were kept on a single platform to ensure the same solar conditions. The first cooker is flat plate box type solar cooker (SBC) made of steel. The second cooker namely solar parabolic cooker (SPC) consists of acrylic mirror sheet with reflectivity of 0.75. The energy and exergy efficiencies of both the cookers were experimentally evaluated and found similar to previous studies. Keywords: solar box-type and parabolic cooker; comparison of solar cookers; energy efficiency; exergy efficiency. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Rathore, N. and Shukla, S.K. (2009) ‘Experimental investigations and comparison of energy and exergy efficiencies of the box type and Solar Parabolic Cooker’, Int. J. Energy Technology and Policy, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.201–212. Biographical notes: Nitesh Rathore received his BE in Mechanical Engineering from Hitkarini College of Engineering and Technology, Jabalpur, India in 2007. He is currently pursuing his MTech in Thermal and Fluid Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IT, BHU, Varanasi, India. His research interest is evaluation of performance of solar energy based technologies. S.K. Shukla is basically a Mechanical Engineer with Master and Doctoral Degree in Energy Systems from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, India. Presently, he is working as Reader in Thermal Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi, India. He has more than 15 years of industrial, teaching and research experience. He has more than 30 publications in journal and conference proceedings including ASME. Presently, he is working on a project sponsored by AICTE (Govt. of India), New Delhi, on “Design and Development of Commercial Solar Dryer for Aonla Drying”.