Designing a new heat sink containing nanofluid flow to cool a photovoltaic solar cell equipped with reflector

Background: Today, one of the concerns is to reduce the efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells as their temperature rises. Therefore, cooling photovoltaic is one of the challenges that will be addressed in this article. In this paper, the cooling of a photovoltaic cell by a newly designed heatsink is numerically investigated. Method: Two nanofluids were used to cool the heatsink. The heatsink consists of an Aluminum cover and two main parts in which there are numerous channels with zigzag walls. Moreover, the two-phase mixture method was employed to simulate the nanofluids flow based on finite volume method. The performance of the heatsink and photovoltaic were studied for concentration of the nanoparticles at different Reynolds numbers. Findings: Using nanofluids increases the heat transfer coefficient but also increases the required pumping power. By adding 2% alumina at the Reynolds number of 150, the heat transfer coefficient increases by 83%. Furthermore, Al2O3/H2O nanofluids has better thermal resistance and temperature uniformity than CuO/H2O nanofluids for heatsink and photovoltaic. The addition of alumina nanoparticles increases the thermal efficiency of photovoltaic while the addition of copper oxide nanoparticles reduces it. Moreover, by increasing the Reynolds number from 50 to 150, the thermal efficiency increased by 7%. (C) 2021 Taiwan Institute of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This article investigates the cooling of photovoltaic cells using a newly designed heatsink, finding that using nanofluids can increase heat transfer coefficient but also require more pumping power. Addition of alumina nanoparticles can improve thermal efficiency, while addition of copper oxide nanoparticles can reduce it.