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Improve cooling techniques for solar modules. This is the objective of a group of international researchers, who are looking for the ideal solution to implement in the photovoltaic sector and help companies.
The results obtained showed that active cooling with water is the most effective technique, while passive systems, despite being easy to apply, still have limited possibilities.
In the paper, written by scientists from Universiti Malaysia Pahang, India's Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology and Russia's South Ural State University, they commented that to build efficient refrigeration systems it is necessary to balance high initial cost with higher performance, device maintenance, lack of standard testing and mitigation of hotspot risks.
“If a system is designed without taking environmental influences into account, device maintenance costs may outweigh the benefits of better power output. Air and water based technologies are quite mature and have been widely documented among all cooling systems. However, refrigerant and heat pipe-based systems continue to suffer, but there are still some technical cost issues that prohibit their large-scale use,” the researchers said.
Active methods
As for active methods, the academics added that especially water cooling is an easy and effective cooling technique, highlighting that research on the subject must continue. However, according to them, these technologies are also defined as impractical, as the area around the photovoltaic system must have a constant supply of cold water and the assembly to be cooled must be of scale to offset the costs of the necessary energy.
According to the researchers, passive methods, although they include extra components, such as heat pipes, sinks or exchangers, are considered relatively easy and economical to produce and, at the same time, have limited possibilities.
Future
The study concluded that the future direction of technology development should focus on developing hybrid cooling methods, with the main objective of keeping the surface temperature low and stable.
“Future research should aim to focus on one of the two promising techniques, active water cooling and combined heat duct and heatsink cooling,” pointed out the group of scientists.
Source: PV Magazine
