Assessment of automatic air cooling system using DC fan for photovoltaic panel

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) panel suffers in low conversion efficiency in generating the output power. This is because of the accumulated heat generated through PV panel leads the PV panel operates at the high temperature. The high PV panel temperature reduces the output power generated by the PV panel. To address this issue, the assessment output power of the automatic air cooling system using direct current (DC) fan for increasing the output power of PV panel has been figured out. The first objective of this study is to investigate the effect of solar irradiance and PV panel temperature on output performance of the PV panel by using PVsyst software. In this simulation, a PV panel with the rating power 100 W was analyzed. Simulation results imply that less output power from the PV panel influenced by the elevated PV panel temperature. The second objective is focused on the design and development of the automatic air cooling system for PV panel. In development of the automatic air cooling system, the desired number of DC fan was determined for the selected PV panel. Therefore, the performance of PV panel without cooling system was investigated at the outdoor of Centre of Excellence for Renewable Energy (CERE), University Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia. The distribution temperature of the PV panel for the outdoor measurement was applied into formulation equations of heat extraction to calculate the required air flow of the DC fan. In order to verify the calculation results, the effect of the two units DC fan on PV panel performance was investigated by using the PVsyst software. Results found that the desired number of DC fan to improve the output power produced by a PV panel is determined by two units. Besides, the operation of DC fan was controlled by the PIC18F4550 microcontroller, which depending on the average value of PV panel temperature. Thus, DC fan will not run for 24 hours.