Study of phase change materials applied to CPV receivers

Abstract

There are lots of factors which can directly affect output efficiency of photovoltaic device. One of them is high temperature which would cause adverse effect to solar cell. When solar cell is operated in high temperature, the cell's output efficiency will become low. Therefore, improving thermal spreading of solar cell is an important issue. In this study, we focused on finding new materials to enhance the thermal dispreading and keep the temperature of solar cell as low as possible. The new materials are different from conventional metal ones; they are called "phase change materials (PCMs)" which are mainly applied to green buildings. We chose two kinds of PSMs to study their thermal dispreading ability and to compare them with traditional aluminum material. These two kinds of PCMs are wax and lauric acid. We made three aluminum-based cuboids as heat sinking units and two of them were designed with hollow space to fill in the PCMs. We applied electric forward bias on solar cells to simulate the heat contributed from the concentrated sunlight. Then we observed the thermal distribution of these three kinds of thermal spreading materials. Two levels of forward biases were chosen to test the samples and analyze the experiment results.