PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF FLOATING PHOTOVOLTAIC (FPV) SOLAR PANELS VIA SUBMERGED EXTENDED SURFACES

Date

2025-12-29

Author

Azhari, Jalees Saqib Kamal

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Climate change and its effect have created a stress on the renewable energy sector to meet increasing demand across the world. Solar PV technology has become a dominant source of energy but losses efficiency in extreme temperatures. Several passive cooling strategies have been developed for solar photovoltaic panels. However, they contribute to uniform temperature distribution enhancing overall system performance. This study proposes enhancement of cooling effect on FloatingSolar PV modules using water submerged extended surfaces installed at the back of module, either through experimentation or simulation work. The extended surfaces help to increase the overall heat transfer coefficient to reject excess heat to the surroundings. This will reduce the system temperature to designed operational ranges to achieve the desired efficiency. It also investigates the techno-economic feasibility of adding water submerged aluminium extended surfaces at back of a FPV module in varying depth to enhance its performance in Cyprus. A comparative study is done with similar PV module installed on land with and without extended surfaces. This approach is suitable for the hot ambient temperature regions including Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa where ambient temperature is typically above optimum operational temperature range of PV modules. The results show extended surfaces drop average module temperature by 2.44 °C and 4.01 °C for FPV and land installed module, increasing average power gain by 2.23 Wp and 2.58 Wp respectively. LCOE for 1 MWp FPV and land installation is $0.082/kWh and $0.068/kWh and equals to $0.036/kWh for both from 500 MWp plant scale.

Subject Keywords

Aluminium extended surfaces, Floating Photovoltaic (FPV), Passive thermal management, PV operation at high temperature, Water-submerged cooling

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118397

Collections

Northern Cyprus Campus, Thesis