Solar Hot Dog Cooker

The sun is a fantastic (and free) source of energy just waiting being harnessed. You can build a simple solar hot dog cooker for use over a sunny day.

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This hot dog cooker works on the reflective parabola. A parabola is a symmetric blackberry curve that resembles the letter “U. ” The focus of your parabola is a point that lies over the axis of symmetry and acts as the particular special point around which a parabola (or any geometric shape) is constructed.

Let’s practice choosing the focus of the parabola. A parabola graphed while using the equation y=ax2 must first be converted directly into standard form. Standard form for parabolas can be as follows:

4p(y - k) = (x : h)2

Where h is the horizontal distance with the parabola origin (the curve) of the parabola from your point (0, 0) and k is the vertical distance with the parabola origin from the point (0, 0). 4p is corresponding to (1/a). This is just a mathematics meeting.

We plug our numbers in to fix for p, which is the vertical distance with the focus from the parabola’s vertex, or least expensive point.

So why would we need to employ a parabola as our mirror, anyway? Here’s what’s thus cool about parabolic mirrors: the focus is the point where all of the reflected light passes by means of. This makes a parabola a perfect reflect shape for cooking a hot dog.

Difficulty

Build a solar power hot dog pot.

Materials

Oversized shoe box

Aluminum foil

Poster table

Scissors

Craft knife or box cutter

Recording

Glue

Pencil

Ruler

Skewer

Single hole impact

Sheet of graphing paper

Hot dogs, buns, along with your favorite hot dog condiments!

Procedure

Using the graphing paper plus a pencil, graph the parabola y = 0. 035x2. (Because this kind of parabola is facing up, you can put the vertex of the parabola very near the bottom of the page. Be sure to scale the parabola appropriately for the graph paper; for example, if the squares around the paper are ¼ inch, make 4 bins equal 1 inch, and mark your axes consequently. Follow the same steps if you're making use of centimeters. )

Results

The focus of the parabola is found at the coordinates (0, 7. 14), which can be 7. 14 units (inches or centimeters, with regards to the measurement you've chosen to use) above the vertex (bottom) with the parabola’s curve.

Solvingfor Focus

Placing the hot dog at the focus in the sun will result in a cooked (and ready to eat! ) very hot dog.

Why?

The parabola is shaped so that it collects the sun rays and focuses these at one point, the focus, in the biggest market of the parabola. This is where the hot dog is put, and the energy from the sun is employed to cook the hot dog.

Because sunlight is so far away from the world, the light rays hitting us are fundamentally parallel. Parallel incident rays of light which strike a parabolic mirror all move across the same point after they are mirrored.

Light is reflected off of nearly almost everything, but we used foil because it’s highly reflective and much of the heat and energy from the incoming light is redirected to the hot dog. This would not utilize a material that was not reflective.