Experimental Air Impingement Crossflow Comparison and Theoretical Application to Photovoltaic Efficiency Improvement

The photovoltaic cell temperature is a key factor in solar energy harvesting. Solar radiation raises temperature on the cell, lowering its peak efficiency. Air jet impingement is a high heat transfer rate system and has been previously used to cool the back surface of photovoltaic modules and cells....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Martínez Filgueira, Pablo, Zulueta Guerrero, Ekaitz, Sánchez Chica, Ander, García, Gustavo, Fernández Gámiz, Unai, Soriano Moreno, Josu
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universidad del País Vasco
Repositorio:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/45826
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/45826
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:impingement
heat transfer
photovoltaic
thermal management
cooling
Descripción
Sumario:The photovoltaic cell temperature is a key factor in solar energy harvesting. Solar radiation raises temperature on the cell, lowering its peak efficiency. Air jet impingement is a high heat transfer rate system and has been previously used to cool the back surface of photovoltaic modules and cells. In this work, an experimental comparison of the cooling performance of two different air jet impingement crossflow schemes was performed. Crossflow is defined as the air mass interacting with a certain jet modifying its movement. This leads to a change in its heat exchange capabilities and is related with the inlet-outlet arrangement of the fluid. In this work, zero and minimum crossflow schemes were compared. The main contribution of this work considered the consumption of the flow supplying devices to determine the most suitable system. The best configuration increased the net power output of the cell by 6.60%. These results show that air impingement cooling can play a role in increasing photovoltaic profitability. In terms of uniformity, on small impingement plates with a low number of nozzles, the advantages expected from the zero crossflow configuration did not stand out.