Thermal Design About Photovoltaic Cell Module of OMEGA Space Solar Power Station

Abstract

Space Solar Power Station (SSPS) is a large scale space power system, and consists three parts of space power collection system, energy conversion system and energy wireless transmission system. OMEGA concept, proposed by Xidian University in 2014, collects solar power with sphere concentrator by characteristic of spherical line focusing. Thus, it is no need to track the sun in real time for solar power collection system, which is great convenience. However, as one of focusing concepts, there exists serious thermal problem in Photovoltaic (PV) cell array in OMEGA concept. High temperature and high temperature gradient caused by high heat flux and non-uniform distribution of the heat flux will have great effect on PV cell performance. This paper presents a method of thermal design of PV cell array to lower the local temperature value and temperature gradient. A topology optimization method using solid isotropic material and penalization (SIMP) for the design of configuration of PV cell is carried out to get the optimal heat dissipation path. Based on the optimal configuration and heat dissipation path, 3D models are built for analysis and comparison. The result of simulation proves that the optimized path has a better ability to heat dissipation compared with the original one, which is very instructive to refine future design.