An active cooling system for photovoltaic modules

The electrical efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) cell is adversely affected by the significant increase of cell operating temperature during absorption of solar radiation. A hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar system was designed, fabricated and experimentally investigated in this work. To active...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inApplied energy Vol. 90; no. 1; pp. 309 - 315
Main Authors Teo, H.G., Lee, P.S., Hawlader, M.N.A.
Format Journal Article Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2012
Elsevier
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Summary:The electrical efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) cell is adversely affected by the significant increase of cell operating temperature during absorption of solar radiation. A hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar system was designed, fabricated and experimentally investigated in this work. To actively cool the PV cells, a parallel array of ducts with inlet/outlet manifold designed for uniform airflow distribution was attached to the back of the PV panel. Experiments were performed with and without active cooling. A linear trend between the efficiency and temperature was found. Without active cooling, the temperature of the module was high and solar cells can only achieve an efficiency of 8–9%. However, when the module was operated under active cooling condition, the temperature dropped significantly leading to an increase in efficiency of solar cells to between 12% and 14%. A heat transfer simulation model was developed to compare to the actual temperature profile of PV module and good agreement between the simulation and experimental results is obtained.
Bibliography:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2011.01.017
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0306-2619
1872-9118
DOI:10.1016/j.apenergy.2011.01.017