Small Solar Oven Subteam

Small Solar Oven

Members: Kaitlyn Hoffman, Colleen Lee and Nathan Ghabour

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.