MIE.19 – Design of an Insulated Solar Electric Cooking System
Team Members Heading link
- Shazil Ahmad
- Adam Camarena
- Kevin Georgiev
- Merlyn Manoj
- Ajay Patel
Project Description Heading link
Efficient and quick cooking is desired across continents. and all levels of wealth. By utilizing solar energy, insulation, and thermal heat storage a new generation of cooking devices can be created. Our group was asked to design, analyze, fabricate and test an Insulated Solar Electric Cooker (ISEC) with heat storage and a Retained Heat Cooker (RHC). An ISEC is a new technology that utilizes solar power to cook food in an insulated chamber. Limited work has been done to understand how to design these systems, they have primarily been made as a “home-brew” device. Our team has focused on documenting the engineering behind these systems. Our team reviewed the current documentation available for ISECs and then considered the different design elements and explored their limits using software. We used SolidWorks to create 3D models of our ISEC|RHC and ANSYS, a finite element analysis program, to simulate what temperature loads the system will experience under different conditions and design choices. We used the results of this analysis to size our thermal storage and determine the appropriate levels of insulation as well as other important aspects in the design. In addition, we built and tested this system to further understand and document its cooking performance and how to fabricate it.