Role on nanofluids in cooling solar photovoltaic cell to enhance overall efficiency

The electrical conversion efficiency of Solar photovoltaic module strongly depends on the operating temperature. Only up to 20% of the incident solar irradiation is converted to electricity and rest energy either reflected back to atmosphere or converted into heat and thereby increasing the cell temperature. As the cell temperature rises, the electrical efficiency decreases. There is need to cool down temperature of the solar photovoltaic panel to get maximum electrical conversion efficiency. Researchers have implemented many techniques for cooling solar PV by active and passive cooling technique. Active cooling uses air, water, nanofluids etc for cooling where as in passive cooling uses of phase change materials like paraffin wax, eutectics, organic materials, cotton wick etc for the cooling purpose. Nanofluids are used to bring down the temperature of the panel by increasing the thermal conductivity of base fluids. In this paper, emphasis has been given to present the effect of nanofluids as coolant in solar photovoltaic panel. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.