Sunday, July 19, 2009

13 Months

Hey there mathbaby,

You are still quite cute.
You are dressed up in hair-ties and hair clips.
You look quite the 80's pop-star.
Even getting hair.

I get to visit on the weekends - I'm at about 100% travel.
Its hard, but better than being away for 6 months straight.

You fuss more - I guess it is the strategy that yields what works for you often enough.
It is likely enhanced by teething (that hurts) and by dad being away sometimes.

I am making your mathmom a solar oven. It is something that runs on sunlight and can decrease energy use in the house by a lot (especially when you live in the parts of AZ that are 117 in daytime and the air-conditioner MUST run all day. Why give it more work?

I am trying to make a hybrid of this:

Flat surface
Simple construction
Single reflector
Angle related to sun-angle

with this:

Corner reflector
More sunlight captured
Collector area much greater than oven area.



I bought and cut dark tiles from home depot. It is taking 6 of them.
They make a great heat-absorber. They convert light to heat, but then do not conduct it out of the box.

The prototype increases temperature from 120 to 180 with about 2 square feet of area (less normal to sun) for a temperature change of 60 degrees. I hypothesize (and it might not be true) that if I put in 3x as much energy the delta-temperature will go up by a factor of 3x.

Here is a good paper talking about solar ovens! (link)

Maybe it will make your mommies life a little easier.
Maybe our bills will be lower too.
We will see.

Have a good evening mathbaby.

-mathdad.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hub, I hope that solar oven gets finished soon!

mathdad said...

It is sitting half-done in the shed.