Design of a self-adjusted jet impingement system for cooling of photovoltaic cells

This study aims to join up wind and solar energy as the renewable energy sources for more efficient production of electrical energy. A laboratory-scale cooling device based on a conic wind-collecting tunnel was designed and then fabricated to cool down a photovoltaic (PV) cell. The collected wind from conic tunnel was employed with two goals; first, it was considered as a coolant fluid for PV cell. Second, it was applied for producing electrical energy via a designed turbine. The great potential of the proposed cooling device on the performance of the PV cell are the focus of this study. The obtained results reveals that the total output power was increased 36% from both the PV cell and turbine electrical energy production. In order to explain the observed results, a CFD modeling based on MRF technique were undertaken. The flow distributions in two modes (with and without turbine) were compared and the effect of turbine blade was then interpreted in terms of air flow pattern diverted to underneath of the studied PV cell.