Enhanced power generation through cooling a semi-transparent PV power plant with a solar chimney

Semi-transparent photovoltaic (STPV) system's performance strongly depends on its surface temperature. To provide a mechanism that decrease the temperature of STPV can improve the power generation significantly. This cooling mechanism will be more interesting if it needs no additional energy. In this paper a novel solar chimney system is proposed to cool a STPV system. The STPV is employed as a roof for the solar chimney and an air flow generated by the solar chimney cools the STPV. Based on the energy balance for three main components: STPV, air and ground, a theoretical model is developed for the proposed system. Convection heat transfer coefficients are calculated precisely for the heat transfers taking place in the system and the obtained results for the solar chimney are compared with the existing experimental data in literature. Results of proposed model have a good agreement with the previous data. It's shown that there is an optimum packing factor that maximizes the generated power for each radiation intensity. It is observed that the proposed system effectiveness depends on the radiation intensity as well as on the structural parameters. The proposed system can reduce the average temperature of the STPV up to 15 degrees C. It is concluded that, by cooling the STPV power plant with the solar chimney for a solar radiation of 500 W/m(2), an enhancement of about 29% in power generation is gained.