Experiment and Simulation Study on Silicon Oil Immersion Cooling Densely-Packed Solar Cells Under High Concentration Ratio

Abstract

In order to solve the heat dissipation problem of densely-packed solar cells in high concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) system, a new cooling method of using silicon oil directly immerse the solar cells was proposed. The heat transfer performance of silicon oil immersion cooling the densely-packed solar cells with and without fin structure was investigated through experiment and simulation methods. The results of heat transfer performance of solar cells without fin structure showed that the simulated data was consistent well with data of experiment and the temperature could be lowered down in the operation range of solar cell. Furthermore, the heat transfer performance of solar cells with fin structure was researched using the model under different silicon oil inlet temperatures, inlet flow rates and the flow pressure drop was measured. The results indicated that the solar cells temperature declined and distributed well with silicon oil inlet flow rate increasing but the solar cells temperature raised linearly with silicon oil inlet temperature increasing. The optimized parameters of cooling receiver with fin structure were that: height of fin was 14 mm, number of fin was 50 and the thickness of substrate was 1.5 mm, with which the large amount of heat of densely-packed solar cells under high concentration ratio could be well controlled and make sure the power generation of HCPV system was high efficient.