Successes and Failures 

We've overcome the hurdle of deciding to stick to the ISEC or branch off into new territory with the solar dehydrator.  Upon deciding to go with the solar dehydrator, we were set back. The ISEC already has been designed and produced, with the solar dehydrator we had to go back to square one and design a product that is both a valuable and appropriate technology for the people of Togo, specifically Salma at his demo farm. On 4/22 we laid our first concrete, which is very likely to be our first failure, but from that we will have learned the process of making concrete and how we will be able to apply it in our design. 

Failure: While we learned a lot of new information about concrete, we recognized it was not appropriate to be used in the dryer. The time we spent on the concrete could have been better spent on other aspects of the project. 

Failure, heat trap decision matrix: We decided to use the cans as the heat trap, we were curious how they would do and the decision matrix proposed it as a valid idea. The issue is the cans take a lot of time to cut, we've spent the past two labs cutting them with the Dremel and are yet to finish. Our failure started in the decision matrix with the time to build section.  Knowing what we do now we would have used the black tub idea rather than the cans as the decision matrix advised. This would have saved a lot of time and we could have had a proof of concept by this time. We are excited to see if our failure was purely in vain by collecting data in the cans vs outside the cans in the heat trap.  (5/15)

Update: 6/8  Our heat trap exceeded our expected air temp, we expected about 130 deg. F but reached over 170! See "Results" for more