{"id":19820,"date":"2022-09-15T08:18:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T08:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/a-low-cost-solar-cooker"},"modified":"2022-09-15T08:18:00","modified_gmt":"2022-09-15T08:18:00","slug":"a-low-cost-solar-cooker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/a-low-cost-solar-cooker","title":{"rendered":"A low-cost solar cooker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600\"><strong>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. <\/strong><\/span>TABEMPE Lesenyeho, a Masters of Sustainable Energy graduate from the National University of Lesotho (NUL), is eating cooked chicken hearts.<br \/>\nHe has just cooked them with a solar cooker he and his teammates made.<br \/>\nIt is low-cost, portable, uses free energy from the heavens and can be used wherever you are.<br \/>\nThe giant cooker Lesenyeho displays at the NUL picks up sunlight and directs it to a pot and the cooking starts.<br \/>\nLesenyeho and team are responding to a problem\u2014a serious problem.<br \/>\nBasotho women in general spend a disproportionate amount of time in the business of cooking.<br \/>\nThey have traditionally used cow dung and wood for cooking and they have to go around fetching them.<br \/>\nThat adds too much to their already busy schedule.<br \/>\nPlus those fuels are running out.<br \/>\nWhat could be other alternatives?<br \/>\n\u201cWe believe this cooker could be among the tools that can help, especially in sunny days of the year,\u201d Lesenyeho introduced his gadget.<br \/>\nToday, we are going to go through the solar cooker and consider it alongside our understanding of solar energy to really appreciate how the cooker works.<br \/>\nMost of the energy we use on earth comes directly or indirectly from the sun.<br \/>\nWe would all be dead, in fact, we would not have lived at all, without the sun.<br \/>\nBefore you finish reading this sentence, you will have used some energy from the sun.<br \/>\nIt was trapped during a process of photosynthesis by the plant (food) you ate or it was transferred from the plant to the animal (food) you ate.<br \/>\nIn much of this, the sun\u2019s energy was absorbed and changed into other forms of energy.<br \/>\n\u201cWe use a similar process with the solar cooker,\u201d Lesenyeho said.<br \/>\nSo let\u2019s start the journey.<br \/>\nThe journey starts from the heavens, right inside the sun, where light is produced.<br \/>\nThat\u2019s an odd place to begin but it sure begins there.<br \/>\nLight is made of particles called photons which\u2014can you believe it\u2014have no mass!<br \/>\nWhen it leaves the centre of the sun, a photon might take 10 000 years or many, many more years before it reaches the sun\u2019s surface.<br \/>\nBut out of the sun\u2019s surface, the photon will take just 8.3 minutes to reach the earth, travelling through a distance of 150 000 kilometres.<br \/>\nOnly light travels at the speed of light.<br \/>\nIt is faster than anything we know.<br \/>\nOnce it reaches us the mortals on the surface of the earth, Lesenyeho and his team are already waiting.<br \/>\nThey\u2019ve got plans for it!<br \/>\nThaane \u2019Mokose and Molibeli Rakauoane are other members of his team.<br \/>\nThey are supervised by Dr Naleli Matjelo and Professor Leboli Zak Thamae.<br \/>\nAll this is happening under the NUL Energy Research Centre and the NUL Innovation Hub.<br \/>\nIn order to make a wise use of light from the sun, you have to understand it.<br \/>\nAs Physics students, the fearsome threesome know a thing or two about light.<br \/>\n\u201cSo we generated Physics equations that would help us make use of the light,\u201d he said.<br \/>\nSo when the light from the sun touches their solar cooker surface, it is reflected.<br \/>\nThat is because Lesenyeho and the team have selected a specifically shiny material with which to cover the inside of their cooker. But the light is not reflected to just about anywhere.<br \/>\nThis is where the Physics equations come in.<br \/>\n\u201cBased on those equations, we have designed the cooker such that when light hits its surface, it is directed to the pot placed at the centre of the cooker.\u201d<br \/>\nThe idea is to have the pot bombarded with as many of the light particles as possible.<br \/>\nNow something interesting happens when the light reaches the pot.<br \/>\nThe pot is black so that it can absorb as much of the light as possible.<br \/>\nHave you realised you get cooked more when wearing a black t-shirt in a hot summer day?<br \/>\nIf you didn\u2019t know, now you know.<br \/>\nAccording to Lesenyeho, \u201cthe light is then absorbed by the pot and turned into heat.\u201d<br \/>\nSounds simple but it is not.<br \/>\nIn fact, how exactly that happens and what it means, can come in so many explanations and here is one of them.<br \/>\nRemember light is made of the particles called photons.<br \/>\nWhen the photons enter the black body, the pot, the particles that make the pot itself (the atoms) get excited!<br \/>\nWell, that in science does not mean they get happy (although they might as well be, who doesn\u2019t enjoy getting visitors with bundles of energy?).<br \/>\nIt simply means the photons give them some energy they did not have.<br \/>\nSome of these atoms are so excited that they do not just shake, they move.<br \/>\nYes they jump with \u201cexcitement\u201d!<br \/>\nAs they move, they lose some energy and we feel some of that energy as \u201cheat.\u201d<br \/>\nThat heat is transferred from the black pot to the food inside.<br \/>\nThe food particles also get so \u201cexcited,\u201d they get cooked. Lesenyeho is now ready to eat.<\/p>\n<p><strong>For More News And Analysis About <a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\">Lesotho<\/a> Follow <a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/\">Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. TABEMPE Lesenyeho, a Masters of Sustainable Energy graduate from the National University of Lesotho (NUL), is eating cooked chicken hearts. He has just cooked them with a solar cooker he and his teammates made. It is low-cost, portable, uses free energy from the heavens and can be used wherever you are. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":19819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,8,16],"tags":[233,246,245],"class_list":["post-19820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","category-homepage-english","category-twitter","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-lesotho","tag-lesotho"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.1 (Yoast SEO v27.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A low-cost solar cooker - Lesotho<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/lesotho\/all-news\/a-low-cost-solar-cooker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A low-cost solar cooker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Africa-Press &#8211; Lesotho. TABEMPE Lesenyeho, a Masters of Sustainable Energy graduate from the National University of Lesotho (NUL), is eating cooked chicken hearts. He has just cooked them with a solar cooker he and his teammates made. It is low-cost, portable, uses free energy from the heavens and can be used wherever you are. 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