UA Engineering students working together to harness the power of the sun to improve people’s lives will face off in a first ever design display.

The inaugural “Solar Oven Throw Down 2010” involves up to 80 different oven designs from freshmen of ENGR 102 classes at the UA College of Engineering.

ENGR 102 is offered as an introduction to engineering design, teaching how teamwork, communication and engineering design techniques can be applied to a variety of real-world engineering challenges. ENGR 102 class is mostly UA freshmen but is also offered in 16 high schools around the state.

The Solar Oven Project has been around for more than a decade, said Brian Cunningham, ENGR 102 coordinator. “As far as I know this is the first throw down ever,” he said.

Why throw it down this year on the UA Mall?

“The students are used to seeing 6-8 different ovens in their own class, but this will give them a chance to see up to 80 different ovens,” Cunningham said. “Every semester we try to do something that will give the students the opportunity to see the work of their peers. This should be an awesome spectacle.”

Two ENGR 102 classes have 11 sections combined, with up to eight solar ovens per section… and the UA Mall will be set up to accommodate ovens from all sections at once on Nov. 5.

Solar Oven Throw Down 2010 is supported by a Student/Faculty Interaction grant from the UA Office of Student Affairs. The Student/Faculty Interaction Program was established in response to research that shows the more contact students have with faculty members, the more likely they will stay in school and graduate.

This award-winning program allows students to interact in more social settings with faculty, reducing students' reservations about approaching their instructors to ask for help or advice. “All ENGR 102 section instructors will be there… which includes 11 members of the College of Engineering faculty,” Cunningham said. “Other faculty members have been invited, and we’ll have a great turn out.”

ENGR 102’s solar oven experiment involves several steps. First, students learn about basic thermodynamics. From there they develop a mathematical expression to describe the behavior of the solar oven, which is essentially a box in a box.

Students then use Microsoft Excel to evaluate the mathematical expression and model their solar oven… a crucial step where students learn about design tradeoffs.  This is followed by a first round of tests that all of the students participate in. Each team then trades their oven with another team and dissects it, so the teams can verify each other’s design as well as get a glimpse of what they did.

The teams then design a new and improved oven -- and the Solar Oven Throw Down is where they’ll test their new and improved second ovens with cookies, and maybe more.

“This is a great crop of freshman engineers, so we have some very creative students ready to throw down,” Cunningham said. “All the solar oven teams have a set of constraints that they must follow… but some of them have thought well outside the box. The odds are slim... but look for flames,” he said.