Experimental investigation on the heat dissipation performance of flared-fin heat sinks for concentration photovoltaic modules

A high-efficiency, low-cost and convenient cooling method plays a critical role in the thermal management of the solar cell temperature of the concentrating photovoltaic system (CPV). In this research, an improved flared-fin heat sink was proposed to meet the high-density heat dissipation requirement of CPV. The overall thermal resistance of 15 heat sink samples with different fin number and fin length is experimentally investigated under various inclination angles. The results demonstrate that the overall thermal resistance of the flared-fin heat sink is decreased by 10% but not significantly increased in the weight and volume while comparing with a rectangular plate-fin heat sink. The thermal performance is greatly impacted by the fin number and fin length of the flared-fin heat sink but is not very sensitive to the inclination angle. The optimal fin numbers for maximum heat transfer was found to be 15-18 under the experimental conditions and has nothing to do with the inclination angle. Moreover, the Nusselt number correlation of the proposed flared-fin heat sink is presented for facilitating the design of CPV systems when the Rayleigh number Ras, number of fins N-fin and fin length L-fin are in the ranges 10(2) < Ra-s < 10(6), 3 < N-fin < 19 and 35 < L-fi(n) < 115 mm, respectively.