Bachelor Final-Year Project:

 

Design, Fabrication and Testing of 2 sq. m Lotus Solar Reflector

 

Abstract

 

Energy supply for Nepal's household cooking is completely dependent on biomass and imported petroleum fuels. This made it vulnerable and inevitable to frequently confront with energy related problems like fuel shortage, high fuel price fluctuation and health hazards of conventional biomass stoves. To tackle this problem, our project aimed to develop a clean, renewable and sustainable solution for household cooking. Various forms of alternative solutions like biogas, briquettes, electric stoves and solar cooking technologies were reviewed. Among them, solar thermal energy was realized to be a novel and viable solution that could provide significant amount of thermal energy for household cooking. But current state of solar cooking technology possess delimits regarding efficiency, convenience and cost that has hindered the exploitation of beneficial solar energy. The need for refining the parameters of current solar cooking technology was realized to develop an optimized solar cooker. During the one year project period, a parabolic dish type reflector with automatic tracking named ‘Lotus solar reflector’ was designed, fabricated and tested taking reference to widely adopted ‘2 sq. m Scheffler reflector’. Water boiling tests on prototype gave thermal power output ranging from 200W to 610.9W and overall efficiency ranging from 19.22% to 40.47% during the testing period on 28 August 2015. Hence, the experiments on ‘Lotus solar reflector’ prototype manifested significant potential for harvesting solar thermal energy using ordinary reflecting materials along with tracking mechanism.