Development of an active cooling mechanism to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic module

Abstract

In this thesis, the influence of the temperature of photovoltaic (PV) module on the energy conversion efficiency have been thoroughly investigated and analysed. The objectives of this research are to study the suitability of solar irradiance for power generation in Perlis and analyse the influence of the temperature towards the efficiency of PV power conversion. Next, the technique to design the cooling mechanism is determined in order to reduce the operating temperature of PV module. Lastly, the effect of cooling mechanism on PV module performance is investigated. In this research, forced convective air cooling method is selected to reduce the operating temperature of the PV module. The experiments were conducted under outdoor conditions to compare the influence of the temperature when it operates under cooling and without cooling mechanism. During high operating temperatures of the PV module, the power conversion efficiency of the PV module can be drastically reduced. The forced convective air cooling technique is suitable to be installing on PV module in order to reduce the PV operating temperature. At first, when the PV module operates under cooling mechanism, the operating temperature has significantly drop and able to increase the efficiency of the PV module by 11%. However, when the PV module operated without cooling mechanism, the operating temperature was high as to compare with the previous condition, and the conversion efficiency could only be achieve by 8.2%. In overall, it appears that in this research, the PV module with cooling mechanism is the effective technique to reduce the operating temperature of PV module at highest efficiency level.