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What Saussure created was the earliest known solar cooker, most comparable to what we now call a solar box cooker.
He nested five glass boxes one inside the other, and rested them on a black slab of wood. After several hours exposed to sunlight, the temperature inside the box reached just shy of degrees Fahrenheit 88 degrees Celsius. He used the box to bake fruit.
It's also a very cool, environmentally friendly replacement for the typical backyard barbecue. The modern concept of solar cooking first came on the scene in the s but failed to gain popularity, perhaps due to faulty United Nations marketing techniques [source: With the right device, the thermal heat energy in the sun's rays can be harnessed to achieve temperatures so hot they can fry food. A solar cooker can do almost anything a stove or an oven can do, only it uses a natural nonpolluting, free, abundant energy source.
A solar cooker is a device which uses the energy of direct sunlight to heat, cook or pasteurise drink and other food materials. Many solar cookers currently in use . The Panel Solar Cooker uses reflective panels to focus sunlight onto a pot. These work best in tropical climates or in the warmer months when.
In this article, we'll find out how sunlight becomes heat, check out the different types of cookers available and how they work, see what makes solar cooking a potential lifesaver in many parts of the world and examine some of its shortcomings. Let's begin at the core of the process: How does sunlight, also known as electromagnetic radiation, become heat?
The molecules that make up the box get excited and generate more heat. The box traps the heat, and the oven gets hotter and hotter. The effect is the same as what goes on in a standard oven: Box cookers can reach up to degrees F degrees C [source: That's hot enough to safely cook meat.
A parabolic cooker can get even hotter, up to degrees F degrees C , which is hot enough to fry food or bake bread.
It works a lot like a stove, and it's big, sometimes up to several feet across. A pot of food sits on an arm that holds it in the center of the curved reflectors, suspended slightly above the bottom point of the oven, where all the light is concentrated. This small point gets so hot -- and the molecules vibrate so much -- that the heat waves move upward in a steady stream to strike the bottom of the pot.
Both parabolic and box cookers are quite large, making them difficult to carry around.
How does solar energy affect cooking? That really interesting and always new. This activity generates heat. Yes, but for fruits only! Solar cooking for home and camp. These are usually concave disks that focus the light onto the bottom of a pot.
And box cookers are heavy because of the glass. A panel cooker , which uses parabolic reflectors positioned above a box-type oven, tends to be smaller and lighter. The cooking pot goes in a plastic bag while it cooks, which acts as a heat trap like the transparent top on a box cooker.
Camping is something of a side job for solar cookers, though. The more central applications have to do poverty, hunger and disease.
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