ADARSH C
ARJUN P V
ARJUN S
YEDUKRISHNAN K A
 

The objective of the research is to enhance the performance of the solar panel by decreasing the operating temperature of the PV panel. The power output of photovoltaic cells decreases as the temperature increases. Therefore cooling is essential at elevated illumination situations for instance concentrating systems, or hot and humid conditions. Hence, solar panel cooling must be an integral part of the concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) design. In this work, experiments were conducted to analyse the performance of disk shaped heat pipe based cooling system. V - through PV concentrator of, made up of mirrors were designed and fabricated. An aluminum flat rectangular heat pipe with acetone as working fluid was fabricated and experimentally investigated the performance of the CPV water cooled system. Heat pipe absorbs heat from the solar panel (source) and rejects heat to sink. Experiments were conducted without a concentrator system, with concentrator and CPV with the cooling system. The temperature of the CPV panel reaches 57oC without a cooling system. By installing a heat pipe based cooling system the panel temperature is limited to 42oC.With the heat pipe cooling, an increase 21.5% of power output of solar panel compared to without cooling system . Proposed heat pipe based cooling system has substantially improved the performance of the solar cells.