I, Brian White, made my first solar cooker in early October 2006 when I was laid up after surgery. It was a Steven Jones Funnel Cooker. Good but the limits soon became clear.
There has been quite a lot of change since then. In the summer,I started up a blind alley where I thought you could make a curved horn shaped funnel to concentrate the light to the tip of the horn. A little math showed that this does not happen. Finally I was turned to parabolic concentrators and was turned away again by the math! (And I was good at math, quite a bit above average, I coached girls in my class, etc).
Tracking Solar Accumulating Barbecue
No, math has no place in life. Just kidding!
The way to go seems to be parabolic dishes.
And so I went along and invented the Mechanical Mathematician, a completely non-math way to make a parabolic dish!
If you look on the internet, you will see lots of dishes. Even the cardboard Panel Cookers are basically parabolic.
But most of the stuff, it seems is being designed for machines not for people. Everywhere you see people hunkering down around panel cookers on the ground or stretching across a 4 or 5ft wide "satellite dish" to reach their food to turn it or see if it is cooked. None of these seem to be even HALF comfortable ways to cook!
A handful of designs allow you to cook on a table. This is the way I want to go with the barbecue. Why not a barbie? Solar powered? That should be as relaxed as you can get! And if you could get big companies and the Americans and Australians to try it, before long others would follow. So here are some constraints. The reflective dish must be mounted on an equatorial mount. That just means on an axis parallel to the earth's axis. Just point your axis at the nearest geographic pole and elevate it to whatever your latitude is! The focus must be on that axis too.
Here is my initial design for simple tracking on an equatorial mount. I have a diagram to show how things work. The design should also work just fine with a small stepper motor controlling the water level. It should also work good for aiming solar panels at the sun.
See also
Tracker timer