Numerical Study for Enhancement of Concentrator Photovoltaic (CPV) Cells Efficiency

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Mechanical Power Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at El-Mattaria, Helwan University, Masaken El-Helmia P.O., Cairo 11718, Egypt

2 Dept. of Mechanical Power Engineering, Mansoura University, El-Mansoura 35516, Egypt.

Abstract

A study of thermal characteristics for uncooled CPV in addition to fluid flow and
thermal characteristics for CPV integrated with a three dimensional (3D)
rectangular shaped microchannel heat sink (MCHS) is numerically investigated.
Steady and laminar flow of water as a coolant is used in the present study. The
model is validated using different sets of data in the literature. For the cooled CPV
system, the flow and thermal fields are analyzed using various channel number
(N=26, 52, 78 and 104), concentration ratio (CR) ranged from 1 to 20 and mass
flowrate ranged from 200 to 2000 g/min. For the uncooled CPV system, the CR
ranged from 1 to 2.5. The parameters such as solar cell temperature, temperature
uniformity, electrical efficiency, electrical power, net gained power, thermal power
and thermal efficiency are evaluated from the simulation. Based on the obtained
results, for the uncooled system, the CR of 2.5 is the maximum value that can be
used where the solar cell temperature reached to the maximum allowable
temperature of 85.48 ℃. For the cooled system, the results show that at CR of 20
and mass flowrate of 200 g/min, increasing the channel number from 26 to 104,
significantly decrease the solar cell temperature from 93.2 ℃ to 87.3 ℃. As the
concentration ratio increases, the cell efficiency decreases due to the increase in the
cell temperature while the electrical power increases. Increasing the mass flowrate
provides a remarkable enhancement in the thermal efficiency. For instance, at CR
equals 20 and N of 26, increasing the mass flow rate from 200 g/min to 2000 g/min
increases the thermal efficiency from 43% to 71.7%.

Keywords