- #1
pskpi
- 3
- 0
Hey everyone,
I just came across a competition that was run nearly 10 years ago and I was just wondering if anyone here has any interesting ideas on how it could be done.
These were the criteria:
Store 4kWhr for 18 hours.
Temperature for cooking at least 200C.
Powered by sunlight.
Locally available easy repair & maintenance.
Cost less than $200.
At that price I'm guessing that a PV and battery setup is out of the question and you would need to use some sort of heat storage material like an oil, salt, sand or stone (maybe a combination of a liquid and solid or something else?). One of the issues I see is that you're probably going to need a lot of the heat storage material to actually store the heat and with the weight you'll get the issue with moving your thermal storage from outside (where you collect the heat) and inside (where you cook).
You could use insulated pipes to pump a heat transfer fluid but it starts to get more complicated and expensive. Is there a way to transfer heat from something like a parabolic concentrator to the storage vessel?
The stove in this competition was targeted towards households in rural villages so instead of building an individual setup for each house, what about a larger centralised setup for something like 50 households where the 'heat' could be stored in one place and then collected or delivered when a person needs it? You wouldn't need as much individual storage and you don't need to supply each house with it's own concentrator setup. I have no idea how this could be made to work though.
What do you think, with such a tight budget is it actually possible?
Thanks for reading.
I just came across a competition that was run nearly 10 years ago and I was just wondering if anyone here has any interesting ideas on how it could be done.
These were the criteria:
Store 4kWhr for 18 hours.
Temperature for cooking at least 200C.
Powered by sunlight.
Locally available easy repair & maintenance.
Cost less than $200.
At that price I'm guessing that a PV and battery setup is out of the question and you would need to use some sort of heat storage material like an oil, salt, sand or stone (maybe a combination of a liquid and solid or something else?). One of the issues I see is that you're probably going to need a lot of the heat storage material to actually store the heat and with the weight you'll get the issue with moving your thermal storage from outside (where you collect the heat) and inside (where you cook).
You could use insulated pipes to pump a heat transfer fluid but it starts to get more complicated and expensive. Is there a way to transfer heat from something like a parabolic concentrator to the storage vessel?
The stove in this competition was targeted towards households in rural villages so instead of building an individual setup for each house, what about a larger centralised setup for something like 50 households where the 'heat' could be stored in one place and then collected or delivered when a person needs it? You wouldn't need as much individual storage and you don't need to supply each house with it's own concentrator setup. I have no idea how this could be made to work though.
What do you think, with such a tight budget is it actually possible?
Thanks for reading.