Experimental investigation on using a novel phase change material (PCM) in micro structure photovoltaic cooling system

This work focused on experimental investigation of using a novel phase change material (PCM) in a PV module to enhance its cooling performance. Phase change material by absorbing a lot of heat from the surface of the PV module and control the heat capacitance of the system causes to raising its overall efficiency. In order to postpone the melting of the PCM material, copper microchannel tubes in which cold water is flowing is used and located in a chamber at the backside of the PV module. At first step of experiments, sheep fat has been used as a novel PCM and secondly; in order to increase the cooling efficiency of the sheep fat, CuO nanoparticles (0.004 (w/v)) have added to it. The results of the pure sheep fat and sheep fat + CuO nanoparticels have been compared with the layout of using paraffin wax as a conventional PCM. The obtained results of surface temperature, maximum power increase and electrical efficiency of the PV module for using each PCM materials have been compared. Results show that using both PCMs (sheep fat and paraffin wax) can enhance the cooling performance of the studied PV module; however, sheep fat is more efficient rather than the paraffin wax. In addition, results depicted that adding CuO nanoparticels in the sheep fat causes to significantly decrease in the average temperature of PV module surface. The research experiments of using sheep fat + CuO nanoparticels confirm that the maximum generated power is increased about 24.6% to 26.2% compared with the layout of no cooling system and 5.3% to 12% compared to paraffin wax.