 An active cooling system for photovoltaic modulesH.G. Teo, P.S. Lee and M.N.A. Hawlader Applied Energy, 2012, vol. 90, issue 1, 309-315 Abstract: The electrical efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) cell is adversely affected by the significant increase of cell operating temperature during absorption of solar radiation. A hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar system was designed, fabricated and experimentally investigated in this work. To actively cool the PV cells, a parallel array of ducts with inlet/outlet manifold designed for uniform airflow distribution was attached to the back of the PV panel. Experiments were performed with and without active cooling. A linear trend between the efficiency and temperature was found. Without active cooling, the temperature of the module was high and solar cells can only achieve an efficiency of 8–9%. However, when the module was operated under active cooling condition, the temperature dropped significantly leading to an increase in efficiency of solar cells to between 12% and 14%. A heat transfer simulation model was developed to compare to the actual temperature profile of PV module and good agreement between the simulation and experimental results is obtained. Keywords: Hybrid photovoltaic/thermal system; Manifold design; Active cooling; Operating temperature; Cell efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:90:y:2012:i:1:p:309-315 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2011.01.017 Access Statistics for this article Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier |
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