Numerical Investigation of Micro-channel based Active Module Cooling for Solar CPV System

Published Date
Energy Procedia
2014, Vol.54:400–416, doi:10.1016/j.egypro.2014.07.283
4^th International Conference on Advances in Energy Research (ICAER 2013)
Open Access, Creative Commons license

Author 

• K.S. Reddy ^a,,
 
• S. Lokeswaran ^a
 
• Pulkit Agarwal ^a
 
• Tapas K. Mallick ^b

• aHeat Transfer and Thermal Power Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai - 600 036, India
• bEnvironment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Cornwall, UK

Available online 25 August 2014.

Abstract

Concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) technology is one of the fastest growing solar energy technologies achieving higher electrical conversion efficiencies. The increase in temperature of solar CPV cell significantly reduces the performance; the efficiency of a CPV system can be improved by introducing effective thermal management or cooling system. This paper presents the design and numerical analysis of a heat sink based on micro-channels for efficient cooling of a commercial high concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) cell. A combinatory model of an array of micro-channels enclosed in a wide parallel flow channel design is developed. The optimized geometry of the micro-channel heat sink was found by using commercial CFD software ANSYS 13. Based on numerical simulations, it is found that the optimum configuration of micro-channel with 0.5 mm width and aspect ratio of 8. The micro-channels provided high heat transfer over heat generations spots and parallel flow channels resulted in lower pressure drop. The temperature rise across the micro-channel is estimated as10K in CPV module of 120 x 120 mm² and with a pressure drop of 8.5 kPa along a single channel with six such channels in each modules at a flow rate of 0.105 liter/s.

Keywords

Solar Energy

Concentrating Photovoltaic system

Microchannel Heatsink

NumericalAnalysis.

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• ☆
  Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Organizing Committee of ICAER 2013.

• ⁎ 
  Corresponding author. Tel.: +044-22574702.

Copyright © 2014 K.S. Reddy. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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