Performance enhancement of the concentrated photovoltaic using different phase change material configurations

Concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) systems are used to generate electrical power with a relatively lower cost per KWh.Because of high solar concentration, the cell temperature increases rabidly, and accordingly an efficient cooling method is needed. Therefore, the use of intensive cooling with PCM can reduce the cell temperature and enhance the system performance. The disadvantage of using this technique is that a hot spot appears at the top of CPV system due to the high-temperature gradient. Therefore, the main objective of the current work is to overcome such problem by first, adding a bulk of PCM at the top of the regular configuration and second changing the PCM tank configuration to a parallelogram shape. The performance of the CPV system with the developed configuration of PCM is investigated numerically. Results indicate that a significant reduction of hot spot temperature of about 9 degrees C is attained using the new configurations. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.