Ghana Solar Cooker

Lead Contact: Brian Roehl, broehl2illinois [dot] edu

Mettings: 7:00 - 8:00 on Monday night, 106B6 Engineering Hall

Project Description: This is a new project, initially to be used in Ghana. The goal of the Solar Cooker project is to develop a stored energy solar cooker. Specifically, it will collect heat during the day, and use it for cooking in the evening. In this way, solar cooking will become available to anyone, without a major change in cooking habits. The major difference is that you can cook indoors, and at any time, neither of which a conventional solar cooker allows. This project is being done in conjunction with the Arial Foundation which already has a presence in Afienya, Ghana.

EWB Presents Tom Pirelli and the Arial Foundation

Thursday, October 9 at 7:30pm in 269 Everitt Lab

Tom Pirelli and the Arial Foundation have revolutionized affordable third world housing with the creation of the Arial Home. The prefabricated modular design, and efficient manufacturing process have created an entirely new way to deal with the housing crisis in impoverished countries. Come hear about the new technologies and the inspiration to one of EWB's new research projects.

Meeting 4 Summary

Hey team,

This week we worked on several issues within each group. I'm pretty happy with where we are at this point, so keep up the good work. What I would like to see for this week is a fairly detailed progress report for the first month. Yeah, we've made it through a whole month already. I'd like to be able to post those on the website, so people have more information about where we are at. So just keep that in mind, and at the meeting on Monday each group can put something together.

I'd like to see several things included in your writeup:
1. What challenges you identified
2. What solutions you identified to those challenges
3. What (if any) design decisions you have made and why

So this isn't like a formal english paper, so I don't really care about proper paragraph form. If you can put together something that conveys all the right information, I could care less about the format.

Don't forget about the event we have coming up next week on Thursday October 9th. At 7:30, Tom Pirelli, the Executive Director of the Arial Foundation (which is sponsoring our project), will be coming to talk to EWB. I want to have some well defined stuff to show for our work over this past month.

So that takes care of it - keep working on your sections of the project, and start thinking about what you're going to put in your team's progress report.

See you all on Monday.

Brian

Meeting 3 Summary

Hey team,

Sorry for the late update, exams kept me quite busy for the majority of this week. We had a fairly light turnout last week due to several exams, so I'm looking to have a larger number of you there this week. We worked in our individual groups to continue developing ideas on how to approach this challenge. If you haven't been to a meeting yet, we'd still love to have you there, so come on out this Monday night at 7:00.

I'd also like to invite everyone to come out Happy Hour tonight at 4:30 at Legends. Its a good opportunity to hang out with fellow EWB members, and get to know them outside of projects. There are half priced appetizers before 5, so thats always a good deal. And if you're not 19, its considered a restaurant before 8, so you're welcome as well.

In any case, keep working on your tasks, and I'll see everyone on Monday, or this evening at Happy Hour if you can make it.

Enjoy your weekend,

Brian

Hey team,

First of all, don't forget our meeting tomorrow night at 7:00 in 106B6 Engineering Hall. I'm may be a bit late, because I'm on crutches, and can't get around as quickly anymore...

Also, I have a few things I've been looking into, and hopefully it will help you move along in the right direction.

For Collection: I think I already mentioned Sopogy as a concentrator manufacturer. Also, Skyfuel produces utility scale concentrators, but they can probably help us if we ask. As a baseline, 400 feet of hose on a roof in Ensenada, Mexico, can heat the water in it to 110 fahrenheit over the course of an hour. So we clearly need to do something to concentrate the sunlight in order to achieve the higher temperatures we're looking for.

For Storage: The insulating material I would recommend to use is polyurethane, as the Arial Foundation has developed a process that can spray this foam into panels of whatever size and thickness we require.

For Pumping: I heard about some inexpensive pumps for RV applications, manufactured by ShurFlo, but I imagine there are other suppliers as well. My guess is that we don't need constant circulation, but rather only several minutes out of every hour.

For Cooking: I really don't have too much for you, but if you haven't done so, I imagine you'll need to do some work with heat transfer equations, and I can give you a hand with that if you need it.

Alright, I'll see everyone on Monday.

Brian

Meeting 2 Summary

Hey all,

For those of you who weren't there, on Monday we split up into our respective teams - Collection, Storage, Pumping, and Cooking - and started developing a list of needs for each team. I want to emphasize the fact that these teams are by no means set in stone, so no one is locked into a specific team. There are plenty of opportunities for each of you to get involved with any of these teams, and they would be more than happy to have you working with them. So if you haven't been able to come yet, and you'd still like to be involved, just show up on Monday night, and we'll bring you up to speed with the project.

So for those of you who were there this Monday, I was very happy with the progress we made. I think we're definitely headed in the right direction. Right now I'm working on setting up a place online (probably through netfiles) where we can share what we're working on so that anyone who misses a meeting can stay up to date with our progress. I should have it ready for our next meeting, and I'll explain it more at that point.

Keep up the good work, and I'll see you on Monday!

Brian

Meeting 1 Summary

Hey all,

So here is the email I promised to send out after the first meeting. As a warning, it is going to be fairly long. For those of you who weren't able to make it to the meeting, I'll summarize what we discussed in the meeting.

Project Overview: Basically the goal of the project is to develop a solar cooker which will collect heat during the day, and use it to cook at night. This makes solar cooking available to people who work during the day. Currently, we are being sponsored by the Arial Foundation (www.arialhome.org) to design this system for Ghana, where it will be included with each home being built in a 10,000 acre development. In order to make this cooker affordable, we will be developing a group cooker for 6-10 families, at a cost of no more than $500 / family.

Technical Details: In terms of the specific details of the project, I am purposely trying to remain somewhat vague. I have come up with some of my own ideas of how this system COULD be designed, but that is by no means the best way to do it. So as a team, we are going to be researching and designing the best possible system we can. Therefore, I do not want my opinions pushing the group in one direction before we even get going.

Division of Tasks: We are going to be dividing this project up into 4 groups. The groups are mainly for the sake of organization so that there is a clear set of people working on each task. I know there will be a number of cases where overlap occurs, and that is fine because we can have two groups work together to solve that problem. So with that said, the groups will be Collection, Storage, Pumping, and Cooking. I'm asking each person to choose just one group to start with. Don't worry, if that group is not for you, we'll figure out which one will be a better fit for you. The basic tasks for each group will be as follows:

Collection: Responsible for the system to collect sufficient heat for cooking use.
Storage: Responsable for storing the heated fluid safely, and minimizing heat loss throughout the day.
Pumping: Responsible for circulating the fluid through the system with a pump. Also responsible for determining the power source for the pump (OFF GRID INSTALLATION).
Cooking: Responsible for determining how much heat is required to cook food. Also responsible for determining the appropriate cooking method/appliance.

So the first task for this week is to think about this project as a whole, and come up with any questions you have about it. The goal here is to have everyone on the same page about the details of the project. Second, start thinking about which group you are interested in working with. If you are unsure, pick one for now, and we can shuffle you are later if you like. Also, you can start looking through some basic info on your topic to gain some familiarity with it. To help you get started, I've compiled some starting points for each group. One big thing to remember is that we're not out to reinvent the wheel; we'll be more than happy to apply an existing solution to part of the project. Each individual part of this has been done already - we don't need something revolutionary to accomplish any of our goals - so the real trick is going to be finding ingenious ways to adapt existing technologies to our needs.

Heres some stuff to get you started on each topic. Right now, just start familiarizing yourself with your topic, and getting a grasp of what will be involved in your section of the project.

Collection: http://www.solarcooking.org/, search "solar concentrator", search "solar collector", look at Gadhia Solar, Sopogy Inc.

Storage: search "Heat Storage", "heat transfer fluid", "water heater insulation"

Pumping: search "DC fluid pump", "solar power battery", "pipe insulation"

Cooking: http://www.solarcooking.org/, search "India Solar Cooking", look at Gadhia Solar -> Solar Cooking.

Goals: The last thing I want to highlight is the pair of goals I've set for this project. First, on October 9th, Tom Pirelli, the Executive Director of the Arial Foundation will be coming to U of I to talk with the group, so I'd like to have a few things together to show him our progress. I'll send out more info on that date as it gets closer. Second, I would like to have a "semi-working" demonstration model ready for Engineering Open House in March. So that should give you some idea of what kind of timeframe we're looking at in the near future.

Sorry for the long email, but hopefully this is all good info. Our meetings will continue to be on Monday nights from 7:00 to 8:00 in 106B6 Engineering Hall. I look forward to seeing you all there next week and getting started on some real work!

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email.

Brian