EXPERIMENTAL AND SIMULATION STUDY FOR IMPROVING THE SOLAR CELL EFFICIENCY BY USING ALUMINUM HEAT SINKS

Abstract

The research conducted deals with the use of an aluminum heat sink, which is usually used to cool electronic cores and integrated circuits, to cool a solar cell and study the effect of microprocessors and integrated circuits on the performance and temperature of the cell. In this study, an experiment was carried out and simulated using computational fluid dynamics. The results showed that increasing the temperature of the solar cell leads to an accelerated decrease in the open circuit voltage, but when a heat sink is used, the increasing temperature of the cell is reduced more slowly over the same period. Thus, the open circuit voltage drop is reduced more slowly as well, which means the cell operates more efficiently under the same conditions. The temperatures are 290 K at the lowest point and 350 K at the highest point, which shows that heat is being dissipated from the solar cell to the heat sink. It is evident that as the heat sink's number of fins increases, the rate at which heat is transferred increases because the enhanced heat transfer that results from having more fins lowers the heat sink's temperature. These findings can help improve the efficiency of solar power generation and increase the efficiency of solar cells in converting solar energy into electrical energy.

Keywords

• cooling
• heat sink
• solar cell
• efficiency
• energy