Thermal and electrical performances of actively cooled concentrator photovoltaic system

In the current study, a double-layered microchannel heat sink was employed to enhance the CPV solar cell's overall performance. The numerical simulation was conducted to assess the difference between including and disregarding the headers in the inlet and outlet ports of the MCHS from the numerical calculations. A polycrystalline solar panel model was numerically simulated and cooled down by utilizing heat sinks in the backside to achieve this point. The double-layered microchannel heat sink was studied for parallel and counter flow conditions. The model was validated with both experimental and numerical results in the literature. The results revealed that including and ignoring the header plays a vital role in the CFD calculation. For more details, at 200 ml/hr, the temperature difference increased to 13.86 K when headers were considered. Further, the local solar cell temperature is crucial in calculating the overall solar panel performance. Therefore, the heat sink with headers reported local temperature ranges from 380.6 to 386.9 K instead of 354.6 to 361.6 K at the minimum flowrate. This variation is higher when headers are included and gives the solar panel a better temperature uniformity on its surface.

Thermal and electrical performances of actively cooled concentrator photovoltaic system Articles