Performance enhancement and infra-red (IR) thermography of solar photovoltaic panel using back cooling from the waste air of building centralized air conditioning system

Abstract

Gulf countries like the UAE are blessed with plenty of sunshine over the whole year. The solar photovoltaic system is an appropriate alternative for the production of electricity. Solar irradiance is partially converted into electricity and the remaining is dissipated as accumulated heat which elevates the operating temperature of the solar PV panel. The elevated temperature has adverse effect on the electrical performance of SPV panels. In this study, a unique back cooling, through the application of waste air from a centralized air conditioning system, is presented to compensate for the degradation of electrical power by the temperature. The experimental results have shown an average reduction of 18.05°C in the operating temperature of the examined monocrystalline solar panel, which improves the generated electrical power by8.65%. In a typical clear day of July, an improvement of 0.97%in the electrical efficiency of the SPV panel has been achieved through the proposed cooling strategy. The electrical energy produced by the cooled SPV panel is 677.89 Wh/day, as compared to 623.90 Wh/day of the reference panel. The results have justified the viability of waste air from the air conditioning system as a novel application of back cooling of SPV panels. The IR thermography is also employed to study the distribution of temperature and the estimation of the performance of SPV panels, along with the detection of the superficial defects. In the end, a new correlation is developed to accurately estimate the output power of the PV panel through IR measured temperature.

Keywords

• Solar PV
• Back cooling
• Performance enhancement
• Infrared images
• Cell temperature
• Waste-to-Energy