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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Published in | Applied energy Vol. 90; no. 1; pp. 309 - 315 |
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Main Authors | , , |
Format | Journal Article Conference Proceeding |
Language | English |
Published |
Kidlington
Elsevier Ltd
01.02.2012
Elsevier |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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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. |
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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 |