Experimental and numerical investigation for PV cooling by forced convection

A photovoltaic (PV) cell is very sensitive to temperature changes where decreasing tem-perature plays the main role in the increase of PV electrical efficiency and output power. Therefore, researchers used different techniques for cooling PV modules to avoid immoderate heating PV mod -ules and to decrease the panel temperature, resulting in raising power output, energy efficiency, per-formance, and life of the panel. In the present work, PV panels are cooled by forced convection. Cooling airflow characteristics and panel temperature distribution are examined using computa-tional fluid dynamics (CFD). In order to evaluate CFD predictions, experimental measurements are obtained in a sunny day on 23rd September 2021 for the period from 10 AM to 4 PM. The experimental measurements are performed on three different arrangements of PV panels. The uncooled panel was considered as the reference case. Two different cooling methods were examined: PV panels with forced air-cooling using a lower duct and supplying air using the blower, and PV panels with forced air-cooling using small fans arranged symmetrically on the backside of the PV panels. The temperatures determined by the CFD calculations are compared to the experimentally measured temperatures and it was found to be in good agreement. The results showed that cooling PV using small backside fans can enhance the performance and achieve a maximum total increase of 2.1% in PV panel efficiency with 7.9% saving energy. Using the blower cooling technique achieves a maximum total increase of 1.34% in PV panel efficiency with 4.2% saving energy.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).