Solar Cooking Archive Discussion Forums

Bill Bradley · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Springfield MA USA

Earthbound (EB) Solar Cooker
This is the first public announcement of a new panel solar cooker design. My colleague Alan Karplus and I have been working part time on this cooker for about a year. We believe that we have developed a cooker that is more efficient than most present panel cookers. The improved efficiency is mostly due to the fact that the EB Cooker primarily heats the bottom and sides of the cooking pot while most other panel cookers heat the top and sides of the pot. A brief overview of the EB Cooker is included here. For more information consult our website at http://www.earthboundtech.com
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Bill Bradley, EarthboundTech

Bill Bradley · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Springfield MA USA

This was supposed to be part of the previous post but the system would not accept it as one post.

Bill Bradley

The Earthbound Cooker is a new solar panel cooker. Some design features are similar to those used in other cookers, but we believe that the overall design is different from any existing cooker. The basic shape is that of either a double angle cone or a triple angle cone with the cooking pot located near the mouth of the cooker. Locating the cooking pot near the mouth of the cooker allows the sun to heat the bottom and sides of the pot.

The idea for the EB Cooker evolved as we were building and analyzing funnel cookers and Pravati cookers. These cookers, and most other panel cookers, primarily heat the top and sides of the cooking pot. The heat transfer mechanism from the top of the pot to the contents of the pot usually is not very efficient. Therefore, we decided to design a cooker that primarily heats the bottom and sides of the pot. Parabolic cookers meet this requirement. However, they are dangerous because of the point focus, they are relatively hard to build because of the parabolic curve, and the heat usually is unevenly distributed over the pot surface. We chose to design double angle cone and triple angle cone cookers because they are relatively easy to build, and do not have a point focus. The only curves that need to be cut are circles. We have experimented with different support structures to hold the pot just inside the mouth of the cooker