Investigation of water cooled aluminium foam heat sink for concentrated photovoltaic solar cell

Abstract

Concentrated photovoltaic cell (CPV) is a popular renewable source nowadays. It has high efficient yet cost effective energy harvesting system available in the market. The performance of the CPV depends strongly on the temperature of the solar cell. The efficiency reduces as the surface temperature of the CPV increases. It is crucial to reduce the temperature of the CPV and maintains a small temperature variation along the surface of the CPV. Metal foam is an ideal solution for a CPV thermal management system. It helps to enhance the mixing of coolant due to its porous characteristics and lead to higher heat transfer rate and reduce the overall average temperature of a CPV. The main objective of this study is to enhance the heat removal rate along of the CPV. Aluminium foam is used as a heat sink to removal the heat generated. The effects of porosities and pores density (PPI) of the aluminium foam are measured against the thermal performance. Computational thermal fluid dynamics is conducted to study the thermal performance of aluminium foam heat sink. The parameters required for the simulations are extracted from literature. The results suggested that aluminum foam is able to enhance the heat removal and maintains better temperature uniformity of the CPV. 10PPI aluminum foam with porosity 0.682 provides the most optimum results with average temperature of 55.1 ˚C and temperature different of 7.4 °C at flow rate of 40 g/s. This approach is suitable to promote the efficiency of the CPV and prolong the cycle life.