Conjugate natural convective heat transfer from photovoltaic cells on the bottom wall of a horizontal cabinet to ambient air stream

This study proposes a model to investigate the detailed behaviors of natural convective cooling of photovoltaic cells mounted discretely on the bottom wall of a horizontal cabinet. The numerical computation domain covers the cabinet and surrounding area, so that the temperature and velocity fields of the combined regions are solved simultaneously. Results show that the temperature differences among the photovoltaic cells can be up to 28% for all the investigated cases when 106≤Ra≤108, 1000≤Kef≤6300, Cx = 7.5 and N = 6. The maximum difference in hot spot temperatures of photovoltaic cells is about 26% among the cases with various Kef.