A Review on Recent Development of Cooling Technologies for Photovoltaic Modules
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-020-1350-y
Article ID: 1003-2169(2020)00-0000-00
A Review on Recent Development of Cooling Technologies for Photovoltaic Modules ZHANG Chunxiao1, SHEN Chao1*, WEI Shen2, WANG Yuan1, LV Guoquan1, SUN Cheng1* 1. Key Laboratory of Cold Region Urban and Rural Human Settlement Environment Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, School of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150090, China 2. The Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management, University College London (UCL), London WC1E 7HB, UK © Science Press, Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract: When converting solar energy to electricity, a big proportion of energy is not converted for electricity but for heating PV cells, resulting in increased cell temperature and reduced electrical efficiency. Many cooling technologies have been developed and used for PV modules to lower cell temperature and boost electric energy yield. However, little crucial review work was proposed to comment cooling technologies for PV modules. Therefore, this paper has provided a thorough review of the up-to-date development of existing cooling technologies for PV modules, and given appropriate comments, comparisons and discussions. According to the ways or principles of cooling, existing cooling technologies have been classified as fluid medium cooling (air cooling, water cooling and nanofluids cooling), optimizing structural configuration cooling and phase change materials cooling. Potential influential factors and sub-methods were collected from the review work, and their contributions and impact have been discussed to guide future studies. Although most cooling technologies reviewed in this paper are matured, there are still problems need to be solved, such as the choice of cooling fluid and its usability for specific regions, the fouling accumulation and cleaning of enhanced heat exchangers with complex structures, the balance between cooling cost and net efficiency of PV modules, the cooling of circulating water in tropical areas and the freezing of circulating water in cold areas. To be advocated, due to efficient heat transfer and spectral filter characters, nanofluids can promote the effective matching of solar energy at both spectral and spatial scales to achieve orderly energy utilization.
Keywords: solar energy, PV modules, cooling technologies, nanoparticles, phase change materials
1. Introduction Solar energy has many advantages, such as large reservation, wide distribution, pollution-free and sustainable. Therefore, it has been used in many countries Article Type: Invited Review Received: Feb 11, 2020 Associated Editor: YAN Suying
as a major type of clean energy [1] to deal with the current energy crisis [2]. In real applications, solar energy is mainly collected by either photovoltaic (PV) modules [3, 4] or solar collectors [5, 6]. Solar cells can convert lowgrade solar radiation into high-grade electricity t
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