Numerical Study of the Shape Obstacle Effect on Improving the Efficiency of Photovoltaic Cell

Removing the heat under the solar cells is important to reduce the thermal noise introduced by the solar. Today, there are many cooler designs. Each design has its own advantages and disadvantages in term of removing the heat under the solar cells. There are several methods currently available to reduce the heat, such as by using heat sink, a tunnel to direct the heat flows, a fan to blow the heat out and so on. As the heat is removed under the solar cells, the temperature of the solar cells drops accordingly. Hence, this cause the solar cells operate in stable mode and less noise is introduced in the DC output. In this research, a new approach to study the heat removal is proposed. The proposed idea is using fins with copper pipes run across the fins. This copper pipe carries water in and out to absorb the heat from the fins. The fins are used to conduct the heat and direct the heat to the copper pipe. It is believed that this method can reduce 85% of heat under the solar cells and it has a great advantage of not introducing the noisy sound when operate in a long time. In order to understand this design and operation, a simulation is carried out using SolidWork to show the thermal flows and how much the temperature can be reduced. SolidWork is chosen because this software has a thermal analysis. SolidWork allows the designer design a 3D object and run the simulation to study the effects. At the end of the research, a temperature reduction with and without using this proposed method will be shown and discussed. The difficulties of the design and detail of the heat flows under this propose method will be discussed and illustrated using appropriate mathematical tools.