Tracking solar accumulator and other "great" stuff.

I have been working on trying to make solar cooking better for several years. I have had a couple of "great" successes too. Prizes won, entries to science competitions accepted, etc.
But there is GREAT inertia among the people that decide things.
Solar cooking is seen as something to help poor people. So who cares? Cruel but true.
No matter what you do, it is incredibly difficult to get it reviewed.
There is a whole research ecosystem and it seems that the "intruder alert" goes off (almost) every time I open my mouth.
Basically the system goes like this.
1. Funders decide to offer research grants in certain fields.
2. Scientists write up proposals (that they think the funders would like) to use the money .
3. The funders give money to the proposals that they and their political masters like.
It is not about science at all and there is no room for 3rd party ideas and no liking for them either.
It is a game and we are not invited.
Brief history of my solar research and development.
My primary goal
Ideally ordinary people in a rural village in Africa or India should be able to use their traditional techniques to build the solar cookers.

I made a way of making a parabolic dish shape in mud. This was called the mechanical mathematician. It means that someone with "mud hut" technology can make a mold for parabolic dishes of any size without recourse to complicated math or expensive materials.
The tracking solar accumulator Mark I was a proof of concept device. Can we make a low tech tracking solar device. I designed the dish for it with the mechanical mathematician.
For it, I had to make a "dripper tracker" because no really low tech trackers exist. The dripper tracker is based on water clock principles. And it works!
Advance versions are the clock based tracker. (I won a prize in a competition for that)
and the liquid piston tracker. (Might be part of the mecatronics course at University of Victoria this year! 2010).

Mark I did work but there were several problems. Mostly caused by the center of gravity changes as the seasons change. Part of the reason to make a model is to find the problems and to address them.
That was 2 or 3 years ago. It is long dismantled and not much has happened in the mean time.
I expected someone somewhere to take up the challenge but not much on that front.
Another solar concept I have worked on is reflectors for collecting sunlight for unattended cooking. What is the best shape? In this there is prior work? obviously! But almost everyone has decided only to only bounce the light one time before it hits the cooking pot!
WHY? "because you lose 10 to 15% of the captured energy when it bounces"
What a daft limitation to put on yourself! You can have extra reflector space with 80% power that will deliver that power for 1 or 2 hours and you don't use it!
No wonder solar cooking is equated with slow cooking!
Perhaps the real reason they refused to bounce twice is because the math is hard!
I couldn't do it. I couldn't find software to do it either.
So I did it by claymation and trial and error and using a laser level with the
"solar design t-square".
The solar design t-square is a physical model of the sun that is easy to make.
And the reflector shape was clam shaped and it lined up with the path of the sun across the sky. Did YOU know that?
I didn't either and that is why I did the research.
But it seems that if something is outside the "norm" and not coming from the universities it gets ignored. Clam shaped solar cookers might be lifesavers in Haiti and Dafur but nobody bothered to replicate them and test them against the "cookits" that they send out there at great expense.
Sorry folks, thats sick.
If the clam shape can be the basis of a panel cooker or better version of the cookit that might be 5% faster or 10% faster isn't there a duty to check it out?
At about the same time as I did the clam shape stuff, I made a new model of the tracking solar accumulator. And this gave some inspiration for improvements. It won me a place in the arts and science fair in Toronto, organic islands festival and the Ideawave conference in Victoria.
I ended up explaining it to a lot of people and just explaining it helped with the design of Mark II. Mark II is being built now. I have almost finished the seasonal adjustment frame and then i make the parabolic dish and we shall go from there. So far, it is working out better than I expected. Problems have been minor, unexpected bonuses have been larger than I expected.
Brian

It has been a few years since my last post so perhaps time for a new one?

How has the shed being going? Top pic is gooey cob in a wheelbarrow, next is the shed in winter and the final one is it a week ago or so with a wall built beside it.   So we are getting there.  Do you like my limestone window sills? I made the "limestone" myself! Looks and is way better than the stone sills I had for a couple of years.  I am making a patio with old clay bricks and putting on  the gutters and then it will be more complete.

Well, its done!

Roof is on and shingled, windows are in and soffit is complete. I just have to wait for a geotech engineer to tell me where to put the downpipes for the gutters. Its victoria so he hasn't called me back in 2 weeks.

the roof is framed

Here is the roof, finally on.

Cob roof still not done

It has been a while and I have left the cobbing while other projects came to attention.
Anyway, now the roof will go on and the shed will finally be finished.
Not a year too soon either.
I just have to wait for some clement weather first (very rainy just now
Brian

I got pics

I will post them when i get the time. cobbing has been going well

cobbing again! May 2006

I dug out some clay in the winter and put it in a pile and threw a tarp over it. Last sunday, i rehydrated it by adding it to a 5 gallon bucket slowly and adding water too and cutting up the pieces of dry clay with a shovel. then, into the wheelbarrow for more shovel work.(Like mixing mortar) and when it became a clay slurry, I made a pile of it. (Clay custard!)
MISTAKE!!! It started to crust on the outside overnight even though it was covered. And i mixed up about 6 wheelbarrow loads of the stuff.
SO, what i should have done is rehydrate it a little in the bucket.
Into the bucket, on top of a pint of water (quarter fill the bucket with clay) and then cut through the clay with the shovel a few times to cut up the clay lumps and make them smaller. Then another pint and more clay and more cutting.
then out of the bucket into the barrow. More mixing and cutting and stomping with the shovel (and with a garden rake if you have one) until it is a slurry with little lumps in it.
Then you add the sand. Coarse sand about one and a quarter times the wet clay amount worked for me.
Mixing that into the clay slurry is so easy! So you end up with a wheelbarrow load with about 12 to 14 shovels of the clay sand mix.
AND the clay sand mix only drys out really slowly. So you can mix a bunch fairly wet and let it sit for a few days before you add the straw. That has worked great for me. You can mix it a little wetter (because mixing wet is way easier than mixing dry. (because clay is so stiff to move).
Anyway, the mixing is done and I am in out of the rain just now posting this. I put on about 4 wheelbarrows of cob on wednsday night and am getting another 4 or 5 loads ready to cob tomorrow (Monday)
have a good day
Brian white in victoria.