Concentrated Cooker Subteam

This past semester, the concentrated cooker sub-team has spent much of it's time researching past successful parabolic cookers and both designing and constructing its own concentrated cooker. Past teams' attempts at building non-conventional box-cookers have been relatively unsuccessful. Therefore, our team's goal was to build a parabolic cooker that effectively reached high temperatures of 250 degrees Celsius needed to fry tortillas (a staple food in Nicaragua).

We used a "petal" approach to build the reflector. We cut multiple petals into a flat aluminum metal sheet, curved each petal upward and overlapped the edges to form a parabolic surface. Each petal was adhered together using reflective tape. After the paraboloid was completed, a wooden framing system was built to support the reflector. The framework was designed so that it could tilt the parabolic cooker to directly face the sun at any angle in the sky. In addition, the support system is mobilized on wheels so that it can rotate a full 360 degrees.

For More Information:

• Final Report