Page History

Cocoa Bean Dryer and Roaster

Members:

Kevin Keene, Blake Berger, Sam McDermott, Biniam Gared and Caroline foody

This semester, the small solar oven sub-team set out to build a compact and lightweight solar box cooker for use in the Ithaca climate. In addition to promoting the solar oven project at Cornell, we wanted to promote the sustainable solar cooking technology in Ithaca, given the resounding interest in environmentalism throughout the community. However, traditional box cookers constructed by the ESW teams have been designed for nearly vertical incident solar radiation characteristic of tropical climates, namely Nicaragua - and are not overly mobile. In order to have a functional oven available for demonstration at Cornell, we had to decide on a design with an angled window to accommodate for solar elevation, as shown below.  The smaller oven built last semester will be tested with a Fresnel lens increasing the working insolation of the cooker.  Testing of a heat sink or storage container to be added to the cookers for stabilizing the heat release was begun in the fall and will be completed this spring.  The idea is to understand the affect of adding a thermal mass to the cooker.

Cameroon is the 4th largest producer of cocoa beans.  The harvest is during the rainy season.  Drying and roasting the beans is typically done with wood fires making the resultant cocoa taste somewhat smoky.  This project is to develop a drying and roasting system that will not result in smoky flavored cocoa.