Sun To Supper
Sun to Supper
Building a Solar Powered Cooker
Sun to Supper at a Glance
Here at Sun to Supper, we aim to empower people in Malawi to cook nutritious food using insulated solar electric cookers that are affordable, easy to operate, and efficient. We are a group of students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo who are actively working with Kuyere and and Aid Africa to find efficient solutions.
Background
Malawi
The Republic of Malawi is located in southeast Africa, and is home to nearly 20,000,000 people. Malawi was a colony of the British Empire for centuries, and gained freedom in 1964. Some of the largest challenges faced by the Malawian government are economic expansion, education, healthcare, environmental protection, and enabling their citizens to become financially independent despite widespread unemployment. They also experience an array of health issues including low life expectancy, high infant mortality, high rates of HIV/AIDS, infectious disease, food insecurity, and more.
Insulated Solar Electric Cooking
Around the world people use biomass and charcoal cooking systems, which result in deforestation, climate change, sexual assault when women must search for biomass to cook with, and roughly 4 million deaths per year due to indoor air pollution and fire hazards. With the price of solar panels is continuously decreasing—the price being cut in half every five years—we believe that it can become a viable option for cooking food. Through Insulated Solar Electric Cooking (ISEC), sunlight is converted to electricity, disconnecting the solar energy collection from the cooking itself. This results in higher temperatures, the ability to build a stationary indoor cooking facility, and the removal of health and safety implications. The price of this technology will continue to decrease as the price of solar panels decreases, and our goal is to make this technology as accessible and efficient as possible.
Demographics and meeting needs.
Based on data found through gapminder, the majority of families living in our target community have 4-7 children living in small, usually two-bedroom, houses. This community relies heavily on the burning of biomass to cook food, and is therefore an excellent community to target for developing solar alternatives.
Through connections with the target community, we have found that regular meals consist largely of: rice, cooked vegetables, tea, beans, poultry, fish, and dark meat. The meal pictured above is a traditional dish consisting of cooked fish, salsa, and a side of porridge made of maize of cassava meal.Â
Many of these foods take an extended amount of time to cook. However, our connections in Malawi have attempted and succeeded in preparing multiple meals! The largest boundary to cross is being able to boil water, however because solar electricity is able to bring water to a boil within an hour, nearly any food type is accessible.
So will this work in Malawi?
A beautiful country with plentiful sunshine makes an ideal environment for solar electricity! The opportunity for ISEC (insulated solar electric cookers) to succeed is perfectly feasible, however it is more a question of IF the ISEC will be used.
As long as the device is affordable, easy to use, and functioning, it should gain attention and daily use. This is the main problem that we tackle with developing new designs: how can we make something that people WANT to use?
Prototype #1
In our first prototype, we soldered twenty one diodes together at an extremely cheap price of four cents per diode. We then connected multiple wires to the diode chain to control the direction that the electricity would flow. We then used JB Weld to glue the chain to the bottom edges of our cooker.
Prototype #2
For our second prototype, we sawed a second cooker in half and sawed down either side to allow our second (full-sized) cooker to nest inside. This allows for removal, ease in cooking and cleaning, and minimizes total mass/surface area to minimize heat loss.
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Further steps... We are working to determine the best form of insulation to ensure that we will be able to trap as much heat in as possible.