Optimization of a cooling system based on Peltier effect for photovoltaic cells

Temperature increment is one of the main challenges for solar concentrating photovoltaic systems which causes significant reduction in the cell efficiency and accelerates cell degradation. To overcome this issue, a novel cooling method by using Peltier effect is proposed and investigated. In this approach, a thermoelectric cooling module is considered to be attached to the back side of a single photovoltaic cell. It is assumed that the required power to run the thermoelectric cooling module is provided by the photovoltaic cell itself. A detailed model is developed and simulated via MATLAB in order to determine the temperatures within the system, calculate the required power to run the thermoelectric cooling module and the extra generated power by photovoltaic cells due to the cooling effect. Two approaches are investigated to use the proposed system: in the first approach, the goal is controlling the temperature of the photovoltaic cell and keep it under a specific limit for different conditions. In the second approach, a genetic algorithm based optimization is utilized to find the optimal value of the supplied electrical current for the thermoelectric cooling module which leads to the maximum generated power by the system. The result shows that using thermoelectric cooling modules can successfully keep the photovoltaic cell temperature at a low level by using a reasonable amount of electricity. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.