The final oven temperature must be at least 100 degrees celsius. Teams are allowed to purchase additional supplies for their oven, but will had to their cost. The maximum dollar value a team can spend on additional material is $20. However, teams are not permitted to purchase focusing lenses. Also, teams are not allowed to have a parabolic design. The main limitation was producing an oven with a desired “Performance Index” (P.I.) value. This incorporates the cost of all the material used in building the oven (Cost), the predicted temperature of the solar oven using Excel(Tpredicted), the actual temperature inside the solar oven (Tactual) and the actual temperature outside the solar oven (Tambient). Calculated by the following …show more content…
This mistake affect our inside cooking chamber temperature. We wish we would have followed the criteria and made our window smaller so our inside cooking chamber would have had a volume of 1000 cm3. In addition, we wish we maximized our M/L value for our reflectors, which would have increased our inside temperature. For future teams, we suggest to have efficient insulation. Insulation is the key to keeping the outside box from releasing heat. A smart move that our team did was buying an alternative for aluminum foil. The reflective sheets, we purchased for only $0.35 per sheet, increased our reflectivity by .2. For our team dynamics we wished we would have built and tested our oven earlier, so we could have made more adjustments. We also wished we could have complete the dissection of our ovens, so we could have noticed our mistake of going over 1000 cm3 for the volume of our inside chamber and seen other effective strategies that other teams did to incorporate in our solar