Prof. Ajay Chandak and Dr. Sunil K. Somani have published a paper that describes how they've designed a multi stage evaporation system and integrated it with Scheffler Solar concentrators so as to double the output of food processing applications.

These are the first clips from Lorin Symington's quest to establish the first solar fire powered bakery in Haiti.

With fuel costs on the rise in Haiti, baked goods are becoming more and more expensive. The team at GoSol..org is pioneering a new sustainable energy based business model that they hope will spread first in Haiti, then around the world.

What is wrong with the existing Solar cookers?

Summary

1. They are made for the wrong audience.
2. They are too expensive compared to the alternative devices already available with families to cook.
3. They use the wrong technology.

Details

1. They are made for the wrong audience.
• For a family, they cannot cook food for the members who leave the home in the morning, say by 8 AM or 9 AM. In poor families where all the members go out for work, there is not much that a solar cooker can do.
• They can cook lunch for about 180 to 200 days in a year for stay behind members.
• If the Solar cookers are combined with hay-cookers, they can serve at least one hot dish for dinner. This requires that a cooking member should be home after 3 PM.
2. They are too expensive compared to the alternative devices already available with families to cook.
• A poor family that might benefit from not paying for fuel has its cooker as five bricks and a pot on the top. Often the pot is a tin that held 15 kgs of oil and is sold in the second hand market at a throw away price. It uses wood ( sticks, broken wooden crates, branches etc) as its fuel. The cooking arrangement of bricks and pot costs no more than ₹ 25 and wood is almost free. It works on all days and gives a hot meal by 8AM. At this price point it is not possible to design a solar cooker that can compete with the alternative. At least I am not making any effort to compete in this market.
• A more middle class family where the mother stays at home ( and does not earn an income) and the family has a gas stove that cooks all the food whenever required can be characterized as having a device that cost between ₹ 600 to ₹ 900 and a monthly fuel bill of ₹ 150 to ₹ 200 a month. For it to cook with a solar cooker that works about half the time, the solar cooker needs to be designed to cost between ₹ 250 to ₹ 3,000. The cost of ₹ 250 represents an ideal value for money as it is just below the proportionate capital cost of the device that is already with the house wife. Paying more than ₹ 3,000 for a device means that the house hold is purchasing something costing 5 times the existing device to get a utility for one meal on 180 days out of 360. Roughly the cost of fuel saved balances the interest locked up in the device. For this market, we will try to make a solar cooker trying to keep the price as close to ₹ 250 as possible.
• NB The present parabolic solar cookers in the Indian market cost anywhere from ₹ 10,000 to ₹ 8,500. Their high costs spring from the costly plastic (Mylar equivalent) reflecting surfaces that they use.