A Numerical Study on Microchannel Cooling for Photovoltaic Cells

Abstract

There is a global push for harnessing the solar energy for electricity generation and Photovoltaic cell is the leading technology in this endeavour. However, PVCs face an imminent drop in thermal performance at elevated collector plate temperature. To deal with this conundrum, a proposed microchannels based cooling system is integrated into the collector. To this end, a comprehensive 2-D numerical model has been developed using COMSOL Multiphysics. This model has been validated with existing literature. The variation of temperature across the channel is studied under varying conditions of Reynolds number and inlet temperature of microchannel. Cooling efficiency is selected as the parameter to judge the viability of this system.