engleski

Numerical investigations of photovoltaic panel coupled with phase change material

Performance of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems decreases with increasing temperature with a temperature coefficient depending on the type of PV cell and manufacturing technology. There are different active and passive heat removal techniques to use solar cells at low operating temperature and protect solar cells from excessive heat. One of the novel passive methods is to employ phase change materials (PCM). In this study, a one-dimensional finite difference code was developed to investigate the thermal behavior and overall solar-to- electric energy conversion efficiency of a PV- PCM system. A number of PCM with different melting temperatures and latent heat fusion is examined to identify the suitable PCM for the PV panel for a given outdoor temperatures and solar radiation intensities. Computations results show that by integrating PCM with suitable properties for the considered climatological data, cell temperature can be reduced significantly (up to 15oC), hence overall solar-to-electric energy conversion efficiency can be increased from 13.3% to 25.8%.

PV panel ; PCM ; PV-PCM system ; solar energy ; passive cooling

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