Impact of microchannel heat sink configuration on the performance of high concentrator photovoltaic solar module

Abstract

Concentrating photovoltaic technology is growing rapidly among other solar energy technologies, as it reaches an electrical conversion efficiency up to 46%. The solar cell temperature increases during the conversion process, which in turn negatively affects the system’s performance by decreasing its efficiency. Thus, for safe and efficient operation, low and uniform temperature should be achieved. In this work, numerical simulations were completed to study and compare two microchannel heat sink designs as cooling devices for a high concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) system. ANSYS Fluent software was employed to solve three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer equations. The comparison was conducted under uniform solar radiation with a concentration ratio of 1000 suns (1 sun = 1000 W/m2) and a wide range of coolant inlet flowrate. The impact of heat sink design and coolant inlet flowrate variation were studied and highlighted regarding average cell temperature, electrical efficiency, temperature non-uniformity, and local temperature distribution. The results showed that heat sink design has a remarkable impact on the cooling performance of the HCPV/Thermal system. Whereas, configuration 1 achieved a lower average cell temperature by 11% than configuration 2, while the electrical efficiency was increased by 1.4%, at the minimum studied flowrate.