The 3 sections in this report correspond with each location. The purpose of cooking the tuna melts is to have fun and evaluate the group solar cookers. The purpose of heating water is to evaluate the efficiency of solar cookers. The subject of the discussion in Marley 230 will be conservation of energy and efficiency of solar cookers. The Big Picture Conservation of energy can be used to analyze the energy utilization of a solar cooker, and conservation of mass can be used to calculate the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions if solar cooking is used in third world countries rather than wood burning or in the industrialized world rather than using power generated from coal or oil.
Energy is transmitted from the sun to the earth by electromagnetic radiation.
A solar cooker traps some of the electromagnetic radiation from the sun inside a solar cooker. It also restricts the radiation of thermal energy from food back to the atmosphere. Unlike production of electricity or some other forms of energy, cooking food requires low-grade heat. The required temperature for boiling water or cooking meat is easily within the range of a simple solar cooker. The conservation of energy equation for the solar cooker is in the same form as for metabolism lab in the previous lecture.