Grilling barbeque at your own backyard is one of the best weekend activities. This is true for Americans, who have a popular love affair with backyard cooking especially during the Fourth of July, the Labor Day, and the Memorial Day.
The Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (HPBA) revealed in a 2015 study that 75% of all U.S. households own a grill or smoker. From that number, 45% planned to buy a new one this year.
If indeed American adults, among others, would like purchase a new grill, why not get a nighttime solar-powered grill?
Conventional grills use charcoal, wood chips or propane which release emissions and contribute to poor air quality. Such fuels enable the backyard cooking unless the grill is powered by the sun.
Yet there are solar-powered grills that are only usable at daytime which is a big limitation. For dinner, people would still resort to cook with the fuel-fired grills.
That would not be the case anymore if Americans, among others, would just use the Wilson solar grill.
MIT professor David Wilson developed a solar technology that harnesses the sun and stores latent heat, which will allow grilling up to twenty five hours without the sun at temperatures above 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
Using a Fresnel lens, the solar energy is melted down a container of Lithium Nitrate that stores the good for 25 hours thermal energy. Heat is released as convection for grilling.
Wilson takes pride that this is one of the few solar cookers that use latent-heat storage. He says, “There are a lot of solar cookers out there, but surprisingly not many using latent-heat storage as an attribute to cook the food.”
A prototype of the Wilson solar grill is now being worked on by a group of MIT students, as part of their multi-disciplinary course “iTeams” or “Innovation Teams”. Their target is to make a business model for distributing solar grills to developing nations as well as a grill for the American market.
So far, there is a hybrid propane/solar model that allows flame cooking through thermal convection. It will take a while before a commercial version will be sold to consumers.
Thanks to the Nigerian trip of Wilson, he got this idea of a greener grill. There, wood is mostly used for cooking which leads to respiratory illnesses, increased rate of deforestation, and even women getting rape while they searched for wood.
