Influence of encapsulation materials on the thermal performance of concentrator photovoltaic cells

Abstract

The Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate (EVA) layer in the polycrystalline solar cells suffers from lower thermal conductivity. Therefore, this work presents a numerical study for a possible way to enhance the thermal conductivity of the lower encapsulant layer. A comprehensive three-dimensional (3D) model is proposed to evaluate the conventional and modified solar cell performance. The ongoing research study can be achieved by doping three different nanoparticles of Boron Nitride (BN), Zinc Oxide (ZnO), and Silicon Carbide (SiC) with loading ratios of 10%, 20%, and 30% to the lower EVA matrix layer. The present numerical work was conducted under 20 suns concentration ratio and variable coolant flowrates. The findings reveal that a significant reduction in local and average solar cell temperature is achieved for all studied cases, especially at a 30% loading ratio of n-SiC. Moreover, it is observed that the net gained electrical power was enhanced by 7.16% at the same SiC loading ratio. However, ZnO and BN fillers reported a slight percentage increase of 6.77% and 5.95%, respectively. The thermal and electrical efficiency has been improved with the new EVA-nanoparticle layer due to lower average cell temperature. Therefore, at 1200 ml/h, the thermal and electrical efficiency achieved the highest value in SiC than BN and ZnO; the maximum value was reported 70.02% for thermal efficiency and 16.94% for electrical one.

Keywords

• Concentrator photovoltaic
• Encapsulant
• EVA
• Nanocomposite
• Thermal analysis