An experimental work on the performance of solar cell cooled by flat heat pipe

Abstract

This paper introduces an experimental study for concentrating solar cell performance cooled by using flat heat pipe. The cell represents the heat pipe evaporator, and the heat pipe condenser is cooled by using a rectangular finned heat sink. This study is investigated at various heat pipe condenser and adiabatic regions lengths and concentration ratios of the radiation intensity incident on the cell, and for forced and free convection airflow cooling through the finned heat sink. The required radiation energy supplied to the cell is provided by solar simulator. The findings illustrate that cell efficiency and output power increase with increasing the heat pipe condenser and decrease its adiabatic regions’ lengths. However, cell efficiency reduces with rising the incident radiation intensity. The heat pipe temperature increases with radiation intensity, but its maximum temperature difference does not change greatly with variation solar intensity. Cooling the cell by heat pipe increases its output power by 24.3% compared to free convection without utilizing heat pipe at incident energy 500 W m−2. Using forced convection with double condenser length increases the cell output power by about 9.1% compared to one heat sink for free convection at falling radiation intensity 3000 W m−2.