Design and Analysis of Heat Sink Configurations for Passive Cooling of Solar Panels

Abstract

The reduction in efficiency of polycrystalline solar panels at very high operating temperatures demands the implementation of effective cooling solutions to dissipate the excess heat from the photovoltaic (PV) module. Passive cooling solutions such as the use of heat sinks provide effective and economical ways to reduce the working temperature of PV modules while making zero contribution to emissions and climate change. The performance of the heat sink is highly dependent on the design geometry and the arrangement of the heat sinks over the lower surface of the solar panel. This study aims to find the performances of five different geometries of aluminium heat sinks to be used for cooling solar panels. Additionally, a comparative analysis of their relative performances under controlled environmental variables is made to find out the best performing model among the selections. The study is performed by numerical simulations under steady-state analysis, where the numerical model is validated using verified, previously published research. The results show that an arrangement of solid T shaped aluminium fins as heat sinks provides the best performance among the five geometries chosen for comparison, while perforated heat sinks perform relatively worse. The best performing geometry provides 3.14% further reduction in PV module temperature compared to its perforated counterpart. Furthermore, the variation of the average PV module temperature has been compared against the incoming solar radiation or heat flux, ambient temperature, as well as the convection heat transfer coefficients in respective graphs for each heat sink geometry, where the relationship between each pair of data has been identified. The analysis reveals that performance differences may be better observed at low values for the convection coefficient and high values for the ambient temperatures. As the methodology followed in this study provides a base model for comparing the relative performances of the heat sink geometries chosen, the same model can be applied to compare other heat sink geometries to establish comparison among themselves as well, thus providing scopes of continuation of this work.