Study on a Cooling System for a Concentrating Photovoltaic Module

A concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) module, which mainly consists of optical concentrator or collector, solar cell, cooling system, can produce electricity from sunlight at a lower cost than conventional photovoltaic system by the replacement of expensive photovoltaic area with less expensive concentrating mirrors or lenses. However, concentration of sunlight onto photovoltaic cells causes the cell temperature to rise unless the heat is efficiently dissipated to the environment. Therefore, a cooling system is an essential part to prevent both short-term and long-term degradation of the CPV module. In this paper, a cooling system which consists of a heat spreader and a natural convective heat sink is proposed. Based on the previous studies, the heat spreader and the natural convective heat sink are designed. Experimentally, the thermal performance of the proposed cooling system is evaluated. Also, the effect of an inclined angle on the thermal performance of the natural convective heat sink is investigated. Finally, the proposed cooling system satisfies design constraints for well operating the CPV module for energy harvesting.