Study of the Water Cooling System for Photovoltaic (PV) Panel

Ting, Jun Hao (2021) Study of the Water Cooling System for Photovoltaic (PV) Panel. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

The using of solar energy as a resource to produce electricity is increasing. However, the device that collects the solar energy which is a photovoltaic (PV) panel, the temperature of the PV panel is getting higher when exposed to the sun continuously and caused by the accumulated thermal energy on the PV panel, this will significantly reduce the electricity conversion efficiency of the PV panel. Therefore, a cooling system is applied to the PV panel. One of the most popular cooling systems is using water as a coolant in the cooling system, which can also mention as a water cooling system. The purpose of using water as a coolant is because it has a high specific heat capacity which can absorb much energy compare to other coolants such as air. In this study, a water cooling system is designed which is using a pipe with a slit outlet and produce a thin film of the fluid to flow across the PV panel. Then to improve the cooling system, the design of the pipe slit shape is an important parameter to be considered. Therefore, the pipe design had been separated into two criteria which are the size of the slot shape slit and the gap size between the slit. Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) and heat transfer analysis are performed by using the computer software ANSYS, which is a popular Finite Element Analysis (FEA) package, to simulate the heat transfer between the surface of the PV panel and the water A comparison among the proposed designs was made. Throughout the analysis of the cooling effect, the optimum result for the finalized pipe design of 8mm slot size with 2mm thickness slit shape with 60 mm gap between slit was chosen. The finalized pipe design has successfully reduced the surface temperature of the PV panel from 59℃ to 34.64℃, which is the suitable range for the PV panel to have better efficiency and to operate. Furthermore, the mass flow rate is also one of the main criteria for the cooling system, and in this study, it shows that as the mass flow rate increase, the better the cooling performance for the cooling system.