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African woman by solar oven Courtesy of Wikipedia |
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Background |
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This experiment is testing if a water magnified solar oven produces more heat than a normal solar oven. A magnified solar oven works by focusing the sun’s rays to increase the average heat produced by a standard solar oven. My objective with the magnified solar oven is to have a faster, more efficient way of cooking food for the inhabitants of third world countries because they cannot afford electric or oil ovens. Two benefits of the solar oven for people in third world countries are that they can use them because most of the inhabitants of these countries do not have access to fossil fuels, oil, and electricity, and because some people there do not have ways to cook their food because wood is very scarce, and they do not have access to modern fuels.
A solar oven is a compartment for heating food using the sun’s energy. A description of what Solar Energy, the fuel of solar ovens, are emissions from the sun that travels through space to planets. Solar energy travels in little packets of energy called photons. On the part of the earth facing the sun, the outer atmosphere receives 1,400 megawatts(1 Megawatt=1 million watts) of solar power every minute! Only half the energy makes it to the surface of Earth because of clouds and the atmosphere which absorb or scatter the other half of the incoming solar Energy [5]. All this energy matters to us because it can be used to help communities power lights, heaters, kettles, ovens, computers, televisions, cars, motorcycles, boats, and planes. The sun’s heat is produced by the photons colliding with matter such as flesh, metal, concrete, asphalt, stone, etc., and exciting them, producing friction which produces heat. A solar oven uses a reflector lid to reflect the light through a sheet of glass or plastic onto a dark pot. You use a dark pan because it gets hotter than light surfaces do in sunlight [5]. A solar oven takes from 1-2 hours to cook most foods . A normal oven cooks 100% faster than a standard solar oven! [10] A hotter solar oven would benefit people by enabling them to cook their food faster. A magnified solar oven is my idea to improve the solar oven’s cooking speed. The magnified Solar oven already exists, but it uses a large Fresnel magnifying lens as the magnifier [3]. In third world countries, people there would not be able to come across a Fresnel lens, but they could come across plastic wrap and water. Because water can magnify, a lens using water could be used to replace the Fresnel lens [2]. A magnified solar oven reflects the sun’s light off the reflector lid, through a convex-shaped water bag that magnifies the light onto the dark, thin, and shallow pot containing food or water. Magnified light results in intensified light in the solar oven [7]. This intensified light results in intensified heat which reduces cooking time. |
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What is the Affect of Magnification on Heat in a Solar Oven? |
