Abstract
Phase change material (PCM) based passive cooling of photovoltaics (PV) can be highly productive due to high latent heat capacity. However, the low rate of heat transfer limits its usefulness. Thus, the presented work aims at the improvement in PV cooling by using finned PCM (FPCM) heat sinks. In the present study, PCM heat sink and FPCM heat sinks were investigated numerically for PV cooling and the extracted heat is used for space heating. 4 kWp PV, PV-PCM and PV-FPCM systems were studied under the weather conditions of Southeast of England. It was observed that the PCM heat sinks can drop the peak PV temperature by 13 K, whereas FPCM heat sinks can enhance the PV cooling by 19 K. The PCM heat sinks can increase the PV electrical efficiency from 13% to 14%. Moreover, the daily electricity generation can be boosted by 7% using PCM and 8% by using FPCM heat sinks. In addition, 7 kWh of thermal output was achieved using the FPCM heat sink, and the overall efficiency of system increased from 13% to 19%.
Highlights
Power production using photovoltaics (PV) panels is one of the economically feasible renewable technologies [1]
It is reported that the phase change material (PCM) can be highly productive in PV cooling because it has the ability to absorb/release large amount of heat within small temperature range [13]
All the systems are studied under the weather conditions of the Southeast of England
Summary
Power production using photovoltaics (PV) panels is one of the economically feasible renewable technologies [1]. The present study aims at the performance enhancement of the PV panels. The motivation behind this lies in the fact that only small portion of the solar irradiance converts into electricity and major portion becomes heat. Water circulation and water spray are active methods of PV cooling which can decrease the PV temperature by 30 K but require pumping power [5,6,7,8,9]. It is reported that the phase change material (PCM) can be highly productive in PV cooling because it has the ability to absorb/release large amount of heat within small temperature range [13]. The studies that analyze the performance enhancement of PV using
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