Building integrated photovoltaic: Analysis of wind effect due to convection heat transfer

Photovoltaic (PV) module temperatures are a crucial factor to assess the PV module efficiency. This paper was focused on the natural cooling PV module. Two different height of the air gap be used to evaluate the power loss. PV modules were installed with 0.07 m and 0.13 m of the air gap. The wind speed, wind direction, ambience temperature (T_amb), irradiance, PV module temperature(T_module) were recorded with 5 minute intervals. The data collected is analyzed to report the estimated of power loss(P_loss). Experiment results show that, even though the PV module mounted on the same categories of mount configuration, which is an open rack mount. It was found that, the power losses improve with the height of the air gap. In addition, the convection heat transfer also influenced by the wind flow. The result strongly evidences that wind and air gap have a relationship to reducing the overheating of a BIPV.