A computational study on nanofluid impingement jets in thermal management of photovoltaic panel

Abstract

Thermal management is essential to improve the overall performance of photovoltaic (PV) cells. This study presents a comprehensive numerical study on a PV panel to achieve economic efficiency cooling system. A nanofluid jet impingement cooling (JIC) system with different configurations is developed and integrated into the PV panel to control the surface temperature. A three-phase mixture model shows a satisfactory agreement between the simulation and measurement values. Then, the simulations are conducted to understand the importance of different influencing parameters, including inlet temperature (20–40 °C), number of nozzles (8−24), mass flow rate (0.045–0.12 kg/s), jet-to-surface distance (5.1–55 mm), and nozzle diameter (1 and 2 mm). Numerical results demonstrate that uncooled PV temperature reaches 68.5 °C, while using the JIC system reduces that by 36.4 °C. Lower inlet temperatures and larger mass flow rates result in higher PV efficiency. The number of nozzles affects the surface temperature and its uniformity. Small jet-to-surface distances enhance the turbulence kinetic energy and the heat transfer rate. For the nozzle diameters of 1 and 2 mm, the maximum power increment increases to 20.36% and 20.19%, respectively. However, the nozzle diameter of 1 mm increases the pumping power with a coefficient of energy of 1.18.