Investigation of solar Photovoltaic cell utilizing hybrid nanofluid confined jet and helical fins for improving electrical efficiency in existence of thermoelectric module

Abstract

One of the choices for improving the productivity of a PVT solar unit is selecting a more effective cooling unit. To reach the better configuration of cooling technique, the circular tube has been equipped with helical fins in current study. Also, the confined jet has been considered in the bottom of the PVT system. The existence of a thermoelectric layer under the Tedlar layer makes the electrical performance increase. The testing fluid consists of the mixture of water and ND-Co3O4. The regime of flow in both duct and heat sink is laminar and the properties of testing fluid were predicted according to homogeneous mixture. The validation step showed that present code has good accuracy with published experimental data. Among various scrutinized configurations of fins, the best performance obtained for the case with four fins and nine revolutions. Although such configuration makes the overall efficiency to increase about 9.12%, it should be evaluated in view of pressure drop with calculating performance evaluation coefficient (PEC). The value of PEC of best case is about 5.4 which means that it is logical to use such configuration. Combining the jet with the best configuration of cooling duct makes the temperature uniformity and overall performance to increase about 62.38% and 10.58%.