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The Solar Cooker team designs, builds, and tests solar cookers, solar fryers and other solar powered systems. Our mission is to improve and optimize solar oven designs in order to provide cheap, sustainable, easy alternatives 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 Nicaragua to develop, implement and publicize renewable, sustainable solutions to energy needs. Las Mujeres Solares de Totogalpa has worked with Grupo Fenix building and using solar cookers, dryers, water distillers, biogas generators, charcoal production and charcoal stoves. They have 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, suffering from 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. New designs are careful to use materials and technologies available to our cooperators in Nicaragua. The team visited Las Mujeres... and Grupo Fenix this spring in Sabana Grande during spring break. Eight members of the team had a successful visit with the Solar Women, building 1 new (more portable) cooker, two water distillers and a bicycle powered electricity generator. Here is a short teaser for a video about Las Mujeres that resulted from our Spring 2012 trip.
Click the link for more information on our 2013 Nicaragua Trip.
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Current Research Projects:
- Build and document a second double box cooker.
- Build and document a foldable cooker.
- Test a concentrating cooker using a Fresnel lens to acquire more light to generate more heat.
- Test and modify a smaller box cooker for demonstration use in the Ithaca, NY area (42.4 degrees north latitude).
- Build and document a solar water still for the production of clean, distilled water.
- Design and build a stove top style cooker using a ground mounted parabaloid reflector to bring light to the bottom of a cooking surface.
- Travel to Sabana Grande in March for a technology transfer of our and Las Mujeres several projects.
Other Information
Team Members A list of current and past members of the Solar Ovens team
Click the link for more information on our 2012 Nicaragua Trip.
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.