Thermal management of photovoltaic panels utilizing solid-solid phase change material

Date

2024-12

Author

Akçay, Çetin

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Renewable energy generation has gained increasing attention in recent years. One of the renewable energy resources is solar power. Photovoltaic panels are employed to produce electricity with solar irradiance. However, the electrical conversion of photovoltaic panels is not efficient. Cooling photovoltaic panels may be a solution to increase the efficiency of them. For thermal management, one of the remarkable methods is the use of phase change materials. Mostly used phase change materials are solid-liquid phase change materials although they have low thermal stability and proper shape. On the other hand, solid-solid phase change materials are an effective alternative in terms of their heat absorption capacity, proper shape, and thermal stability. Those materials keep their solid phase after phase transition at a specific temperature interval. The material absorbs energy during its phase change. In this thesis, the implementation of solid-solid phase change material to the photovoltaic panel is investigated experimentally and numerically. Experimental outputs are used as input in the simulations and their results are used to validate numerical models. Different solid-solid phase change material configurations are investigated numerically to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic panels. Numerical results showed that the use of solid-solid phase change material with photovoltaic panel has improved its performance. Average temperature of photovoltaic panel top surface decreased 9.74%. As an ideal design, the phase change material which has 40 mm thickness contributed to the average efficiency of the photovoltaic panel by increasing it from 9.05% to 9.27%.

Subject Keywords

Photovoltaic panels, Solid-solid phase change materials, Neopentyl glycol, Experiment, Numerical simulations

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/113045

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis