Cooking food with fire is undoubtedly the technology that has made humans the best animals on Earth. It’s straightforward to accomplish, requiring only a source of fuel, a supply of oxygen from the air, and a way to start the reaction; then it is self-supporting. You wouldn’t think there’s much to improve, but what about plasma cooking? [Jay] from the plasma station is not a stranger here, and you think that there may be something in this idea, certainly enough to build something.
Now, let’s face it, this is not a new concept, and you can buy a plasma-based cooking appliance right now. But they are all AC powered devices. What if you want to go camping? [Jay] attempted (and succeeded) in building a portable, rechargeable 600W plasma cooking device that could cook food, but it wasn’t all sailing.
The off-the-shelf ZVS driver modules available were a bit flimsy and unreliable, and the necessary flyback coils were hard to come by with the right specs, so they had to come down to work building custom parts. First, the coils. Custom Foroders were resin printed and machine wound with 4000 turns of fine wire, then sealed with resin to the original. [Jay] it is careful to explain that it is important to remove all the air from the windings, otherwise a local flashover disturbance will appear and break the coil in a short time. We think the resulting coils look amazing on their own!
Next, the ZVS drivers on hand had low quality capacitors (well, not enough power anyway) and cheap driver transistors, so both were improved. The original plan was to have four pairs of driver/coils, each driving one pair of electrodes, with a common ring connecting them all. It turned out that this was a very bad idea: the drivers were not synchronized, so they were pulling each other, causing a lot of damage to the PCBs in a very short time. The solution was complex wiring, giving each secondary output coil a dedicated pair of electrodes, so there was no direct electrical connection between neighboring coils and no coupling between them. The smart electrode arrangement meant that the pan would sit on top of the ring of electrodes, causing the plasma discharge to jump onto the pan, thus concentrating the heat of the area there. We were wondering if this new direct connection (pan is now a regular connection!) didn’t also cause it to roll back and kill the ZVS drivers again, but it didn’t seem to happen.
However, [Jay] shows off what may be the world’s first rechargeable, portable plasma cooker capable of making breakfast. What we think is most important in itself, however, is that we would like a plasma-based solution for making toast next, perhaps a plasma knife that cooks the bread as you cut it?
If this plasma cooking worm sounds like a bell, yes, we touched on this way back in 2017. And while you don’t strictly cook plasma, you can make amazing microwave plasma in this ridiculously advanced app. Definitely don’t try that one at home.
