Design Analysis and Development of Photovoltaic and Concentrating Photovoltaic Cooling Systems with Earth Water Air Heat Exchanger

Abstract

The world s energy consumption is increasing day by day and with increase in demand, the generation is also increasing. Most of the energy generated from conventional sources of energy like fossil fuels, etc. With constant consumption of these non renewable energy sources, these will be depleted within few decades. Further with the use of these fuels, the environmental issues like global warming are also increasing. Thus, to tackle such problems, there is a dire need to use alternative sources like renewable energy sources. Among all the available renewable sources, solar energy is abundantly available. This solar energy can easily be converted directly into electricity by using photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) systems. However, the main drawback of such systems is that with increase in temperature, their efficiency decreases. The PV and CPV cells will also exhibit long-term degradation, if the temperature exceeds a certain limit, and the life-span would reduce rapidly. Hence, a suitable cooling technology is required for such systems to achieve better performance. newlineIn the present study, a novel geothermal based cooling technology is developed for the cooling of PV and CPV system, which are named as earth water heat exchanger (EWHE) and earth air heat exchanger (EAHE). For the development of such technology, the simulations were carried out in TRNSYS by coupling EWHE with unglazed PV panels. The simulation results showed that the performance of the coupled (unglazed PV/T+ EWHE) system hardly depends on the EWHE pipe material and pipe diameter. Thus, instead of using expensive galvanized iron (GI) and steel pipes, cheaper pipe material like high-density polyethylene (HDPE) could be used with smaller diameters, like 12 mm, to achieve optimum performance. Following this, the system design was carried out for CPV/T system coupled with EWHE and was compared with existing literature. The comparative study showed that EWHE could be used for CPV/T cooling instead of conventional cooling systems. The