Investigation of Thermal Collector Nanofluids to Increase the Efficiency of Photovoltaic Solar Cells

Abstract

Active cooling technology of photovoltaic thermal (PVT) system allows lowering the working temperature to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. In addition, the absorbed heat produces thermal energy simultaneously through the working fluid in the collector. Therefore, in this study, the modeling of the riser configuration of the PVT collector for cooling PV solar cells was carried out using a working fluid and varied mass flow rates. It is used to find the effect of working fluid and mass flow rate on the resulting efficiency. ANSYS 18.2 system analysis software is used to simulate phenomena that occur. The natural convection phenomena of the PV cell layer were explored using ANSYS Steady State-Thermal. The simulation of the heat transfer phenomenon between the PV cell layer and the liquid was done using ANSYS Fluent. The improvement in energy generation efficiency achieved by utilizing a thermal collector system to cool PV solar cells reaches 49.8%. The maximum PV solar cell electrical efficiency value comes when the rectangular collector riser arrangement is modeled with SiO2 nanofluid working fluid and a mass flow rate of 0.01 kg/s. Each variation used was not significantly different from the efficiency of the PV solar cells produced.