A computational study on nanofluid impingement jets in thermal management of photovoltaic panel

Javad Mohammadpour, Fatemeh Salehi, Mohsen Sheikholeslami and Ann Lee

Renewable Energy, 2022, vol. 189, issue C, 970-982

Abstract: Thermal management is essential to improve the overall performance of photovoltaic (PV) cells. This study presents a comprehensive numerical study on a PV panel to achieve economic efficiency cooling system. A nanofluid jet impingement cooling (JIC) system with different configurations is developed and integrated into the PV panel to control the surface temperature. A three-phase mixture model shows a satisfactory agreement between the simulation and measurement values. Then, the simulations are conducted to understand the importance of different influencing parameters, including inlet temperature (20–40 °C), number of nozzles (8−24), mass flow rate (0.045–0.12 kg/s), jet-to-surface distance (5.1–55 mm), and nozzle diameter (1 and 2 mm). Numerical results demonstrate that uncooled PV temperature reaches 68.5 °C, while using the JIC system reduces that by 36.4 °C. Lower inlet temperatures and larger mass flow rates result in higher PV efficiency. The number of nozzles affects the surface temperature and its uniformity. Small jet-to-surface distances enhance the turbulence kinetic energy and the heat transfer rate. For the nozzle diameters of 1 and 2 mm, the maximum power increment increases to 20.36% and 20.19%, respectively. However, the nozzle diameter of 1 mm increases the pumping power with a coefficient of energy of 1.18.

Keywords: Photovoltaic thermal system; Nanofluid jet impingement; Solar energy; Computational fluid mechanics; PV module efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148122003536
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:189:y:2022:i:c:p:970-982

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2022.03.069

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().