Robust estimation of heat capacity in cooking devices

This paper proposes a method for the estimation of heat capacities in cooking devices, particularly rice cookers. In this method, the response to ON-OFF control of the cooking device is used as characteristic data, and the heat capacity is estimated in terms of a minimal cooking unit in the characteristic data space. The ON-OFF control is based on a single threshold irrespective of the heat capacity to be estimated. Hence the response changes with the heat capacity, but it is difficult to estimate only from the response, because the estimate is sensitive to the initial state. The proposed method collects multiple characteristic data, then selects only the ones effective for the estimation, and obtain their weighted average, so that it achieves robust estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through experiment with a rice cooker.