SOLAR COOKING INTENSIVE EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH OF IBERIAN PENINSULA AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN RESEARCH PLANNING

Resumen

The Southern part of the Iberian Peninsula has a great solar energy potential available for domestic and industrial scale applications. Despite this potential, solar cooking has not been widely adopted. Both authors are employed by universities, one as a teacher in the University of Algarve (Portugal) and other as a laboratory technician in the University of Huelva (Spain). They are each passionate about incorporating solar cooking in their daily lives. They both solar cookers frequently, and have advocated their use in their respective countries for many years.  They consider themselves “well contaminated with the solar cooking virus”. They entered the solar cooking world by making and using several types of solar cookers, most of which were low cost devices made from recycled materials, later working on some commercialized units. This extensive experience of solar cookers and on solar cooking has enabled them to develop and optimise different types of solar cookers, and test different cooking vessels.  By contrast, some published authors appear to have had little day to day experience of using solar cookers. Thus, the main goal of this study is to list some important aspects of the practical use and performance of solar cookers that the research community should investigate.