An active cooling system for photovoltaic module
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 acti...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://irep.iium.edu.my/22802/ http://irep.iium.edu.my/22802/ http://irep.iium.edu.my/22802/1/PV_paper_by_Teo_et_al..pdf |
| 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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