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ESW@Cornell Solar Cooker Team

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Spring 2012

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The Solar Cooker team designs, builds, and tests solar cookers or ovens. Our mission is to improve and optimize solar oven designs in order to provide the third world with a cheap, sustainable, easy alternative to wood fired cooking. We are partnered with Grupo Fenix, an organization at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeneria in Managua, Nicaragua, and Las Mujeres Solares de Totogalpa, a women's collective in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua. Grupo Fenix works in rural areas to develop, implement and publicize renewable, sustainable solutions to energy needs in rural Nicaragua. Las Mujeres Solares de Totogalpa has worked with Grupo Fenix building and using solar cookers and dryers and has recently opened a Solar Restaurant, in which the food is prepared with solar cookers and other alternative energy cooking methods, including use of electricity from photovoltaic solar arrays and gas from bio-digested manure. Sabana Grande is in a region suffering from deforestation. The use of Solar Ovens reduce the need for women to spend hours of their day gathering cooking fuels and helps reduce the health risks from fires used for cooking and the smoke from open fires in the cooking areas, frequently within the house. The Solar Cooker Team works to evolve the cooker design in use in Nicaragua and increase the use of Solar Ovens. The team visited Las Mujeres... and Grupo Fenix this spring in Sabana Grande during spring break.

Please look here for 2011 Nicaragua Trip Information. There are pictures from the trip here.

Current Research Projects:

Design and build a 2nd prototype of a new cooker that can be prefabricated, light weight, shipped easily and assembled with few special tools.
Test insulating materials such as fiberglass batts and rice husks, which might replace wood shavings (which are presently used), especially attempting to understand the long term degradation of these materials during regular use.
Test a concentrating cooker using lenses and/or reflectors to acquire more light to generate more heat.
Design and build a second smaller box cooker (using the experience gained from building the previous smaller cooker) for demonstration use in the Ithaca, NY area (42.4 degrees north latitude).
Design, prototype and test a new prop rod for the box cookers.
Travel to Sabana Grande and work with and transfer the results of our projects over the last year to the members of Grupo Fenix and Las Mujeres Soalres de Totogalpa.

Testing Concentrating Reflector System for Testing Insulation