Heating performance improvement of an induction heating rice cooker with magnetic flux concentrator

Nowadays, energy saving has been one of the important issues in home appliances. An electric rice cooker is especially one of major electrical energy consumption in home appliance of Asia. Because most consumer of the rice cooker are used to use a warmer function all day long. Therefore, a lot of efforts have been made to improve the energy efficiency of the rice cooker. Especially, induction heating (IH) technology has been applied to the rice cooker due to its advantages regarding efficiency, fast heating, safety, cleanness and accurate controlled heating. This paper presents the heating performance improvement of IH rice cooker with magnetic flux concentrator (MFC). A coupled thermal-electromagnetics 3D-FEA was carried out to model the MFC and predict the magnetic flux density and temperature of jar in the rice cooker.