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ESW@Cornell
ESW@Cornell
Solar Cooker Team - 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 ensuing erosion of topsoil and the loss of water retention. The use of Solar Ovens reduces the need for women to spend hours of their day gathering wood for cooking fuel 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. Six members of the team and three collaborators had a successful visit with the Solar Women during spring break, building 2 new cookers and a food dryer with the considerable help and guidance of Dr. Lynn Schlager, PE a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin Platteville, who is a collaborator with the Solar Women. The cookers built this year were extensions of a design by Prof. Schlager and a design by our team.
Click the link for more information on our 2012 Nicaragua Trip.
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 new 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).
- 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 Solares de Totogalpa.
Other Information
Team Members A list of current and past members of the Solar Ovens team
Please look here for information on the 2011 Nicaragua Trip. There are pictures from the trip.
The work on the SolarCooker wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.