To cook hotdogs using solar energy.
The solar hot dog cooker uses the heat of the Sun to cook hot dogs (Light, 2006: Solar, 2003). It consisted of a series of skewers poked through the sides of the bottom half of a shoebox, going in one side and out of the other. These were to hold the hotdogs. The skewers were first poked through one side of the box, then through a hotdog from one end to the other, and then out of the other side of the box, so that the hotdogs were suspended over the bottom of the box. The bottom of the shoe box was lined with aluminum foil to reflect the sun. A large magnifying glass was positioned above the grill, with the handle set in a grooved block so that the glass of the magnifier was suspended over the grill approximately 6" above it. The magnifying glass could be tilted at an angle to catch the maximum rays from the sun. The magnifying glass was used to intensify the rays of the sun and make them more powerful by concentrating them in a small area, and so should make cooking faster. The hot dogs to be cooked were placed on the grill. The best time of day to perform this experiment was at noon since the sun is at its highest and hottest at that time.
The hotdogs were slow to cook. This may have been because it is winter time and the Sun is not as close to the Earth and so the heat reaching the Earth's surface is less. It was necessary to keep turning the skewers so that the hotdogs were cooked evenly. The most hotdogs that could be cooked using the magnifying glass was two because of the size of the glass, but other hotdogs could be cooked just from the reflected sun from the foil - they just took longer to cook and needed to be rotated so all sides were cooked. The hotdogs under the magnifying glass also needed to be rotated.
Table 1 and Figure 1 (graph) show the rate of cooking of the hotdogs over the foil and with the magnifying glass.
...