it can her passive of active, but what will heat a hotdog up the fastest? i was thinking if i didn’t want to use solar pannels to cut a box into a curve and line it with tin foil and do it that way but i want to know what will be the fastest
well.. it depends. if you do it with electric solar panels (sized acordingly) you could power an electrical heater instantly (as long as you have enough sunlight of course)
on the other hand, electric solar panels are an expensive technology, a lot to expensive for your hot dog
the easy way to do it would be a thermal collector (like an aluminium plate with water tubing atached). the sunlight heats the plate, the plate heats the water from the tubing and the hot water boils you hot dog. easy, cheap but it might take some time till the water will reach the temperature
Its not as easy as it first appears. What you need is something that focuses the suns rays onto the hotdog. This can be achieved by the use of a magnifying glass in front of the hotdog (same principle as starting fires) or a hyperbolic reflector behind it (similar to a car headlamp reflector, although this is parabolic in shape as the reflected light is required to be a parallel beam and not focused to a point). The tricky part is to avoid burning a hole through the hot dog. This requires a mechanism that both turns the hot dog and moves it backwards and forwards across the focal point of the lens to even out the heating process.
well.. it depends. if you do it with electric solar panels (sized acordingly) you could power an electrical heater instantly (as long as you have enough sunlight of course)
on the other hand, electric solar panels are an expensive technology, a lot to expensive for your hot dog
the easy way to do it would be a thermal collector (like an aluminium plate with water tubing atached). the sunlight heats the plate, the plate heats the water from the tubing and the hot water boils you hot dog. easy, cheap but it might take some time till the water will reach the temperature
Its not as easy as it first appears. What you need is something that focuses the suns rays onto the hotdog. This can be achieved by the use of a magnifying glass in front of the hotdog (same principle as starting fires) or a hyperbolic reflector behind it (similar to a car headlamp reflector, although this is parabolic in shape as the reflected light is required to be a parallel beam and not focused to a point). The tricky part is to avoid burning a hole through the hot dog. This requires a mechanism that both turns the hot dog and moves it backwards and forwards across the focal point of the lens to even out the heating process.