Enhancement of the Polycrystalline Solar Panel Performance Using a Heatsink Cooling System with PCM

The operating temperature of a photovoltaic module significantly impacts its performance and efficiency. The aims of the present study to enhance the performance of a polycrystalline solar cell by decreasing its temperature using a back surface cooling system. For this study, 3D system model is modeled using SolidWorks 2021 software. The cooling system consisted of a layer of phase-change material (RT55 wax) with a thickness of 5 cm and a heatsink consisting of 33 fins of different sizes. A heatsink was added to enhance the thermal conductivity of the paraffin wax. Numerical simulation is carried out with ANSYS FLUENT 2021 R2 software to generate meshing and solve physical problems. The simulation was based on Baghdad's city climate, which included a heat flux of 955 W/m2 and an ambient temperature of 50.1 °C. The predicted results from the numerical simulation showed that the average temperature of the panel before cooling was 65.8 °C, and when wax was applied, the temperature decreased by 8 °C and by 11.9 °C with the addition of the fins (PV-FPC). Also, the output power improved from 190.4 watts to 197.6 Watts and then to 200.6 watts when using the PCM and F-PCM, respectively. Electrical efficiency was 12.93% with PV only. The panel efficiency increased to 13.42% after applying the PV-PCM system and to 13.62% after using the F-PCM system. From this result can be concluded that Combining paraffin wax and fins enhanced efficiency by 3.5%. This result is acceptable and is in good agreement with previous studies.

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