Cookout Day

      In the few weeks we worked on the solar cooker project I learned many things. I learned how to work better with a group and also divide the work evenly. I also learned how to engineer something that would help people who can't afford or even have access to a microwave or oven. Helping people who can't cook with the modern technologies we have today was a fun thing to do and I think I learned more than I thought I would out of the project. Because we had the chance to do a hands on activity retaining to light and heat I feel that it made the lessons we learned have more of a impact. For the next class that does this project I recommend you take time to actually try to built a solar cooker and apply what you learned from the videos and lessons from Mr. Weiss. I think doing that will make the project go along easier and will create a fun project rather than one where you would constantly struggle to reach a certain temperature. If I were to change my solar cooker type I would try to make a parabolic cooker, they take more time to construct but they also reached a higher temperature than the one I used. If I used a parabolic it would also have a affect on the food I could cook based on the way the food is cooked and what temperature it would reach.

Solar Cooker My Design

     In my group we designed a box solar cooker, we chose the box cooker to see if we could use reflection from the panels of the box to cook food inside the box. Our solar cook will take the rays from the sun and will create a diffuse reflection to the black pot inside our box which will cook the food. When the rays hit the panels covered in foil it will reflect into our box. In the future we will add insulation to keep the heat in the box because we did not put any insulation into our solar cook.

The Best Solar Cooker

     I think that the best solar cooker would be the panel type. The panel type is a very cheap cooker only requiring a few materials. The materials needed are only aluminum foil and cardboard which also creates a easy build and simple cooking technique. The cool thing about a panel cooker is that you don't have to build it a certain way you can get a little creative if you wanted to but the basic way is the easiest. Also the cooking technique is very simple too, all you need to do is make the panels angle the suns rays and project the heat onto the object that you are trying to cook. Now having this small simple cooker does not guarantee it will last very long but due to the easy build it will not take long to rebuild another one. Having many of these small cookers is not at all expensive when the only materials are cardboard and foil so you could make many cookers for just about twenty dollars. Although the panel is not the most durable cooker it is the cheapest and easiest one to build out of parabolic and box.

Image found in http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar-Panel-Cooker-in-front-of-hut.jpg