Numerical Investigation of Phase Change Material (PCM) Cooling in Photovoltaic Technology

The great importance of energy worldwide has made photovoltaic (PV) technology more attractive, especially after the fourth industrial revolution, where researchers have paid more attention to its development. As this technology suffers from operating temperature, phase change material (PCM) cooling will be studied in this paper to control its temperature, of which a RT42 paraffin-based PCM has been attached to the back of the panel. The proposed system was simulated using ANSYS Fluent software to investigate the PV cells temperature with and without a cooling system as well as the effect of fins length on the PV panel performance. To make this investigation more realistic a meteorological file of Oujda city (eastern Morocco) was used to integrate the ambient temperature and solar radiation into the simulation. The results show that the integration of the PCM decreases the PV cell temperature to 13,8 degrees K and that the addition of the fins accelerates the PCM melting and thus improves the PV performance. Besides, the increase of the fin length decreases the temperature of the PV cells.