Optimization of an air-cooled heat sink for cooling of a solar photovoltaic panel: A computational study

Rapidly increasing global energy demand and resulting climate change effects have enhanced the integration of renewable systems such as solar photovoltaics into the built environment. For countries with hot climates, despite vast applications and numerous technological advancements, lower efficiencies of the solar panels due to high temperature is still a major disadvantage affecting the feasibility of using photovoltaic technology. This study analyses the cooling performance of air-cooled heat sinks for the climate of Dubai, UAE, using Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD). A stepwise optimization study was conducted to investigate the effects of varying fin spacing, baseplate thickness, fin height and fin thickness on the heat dissipation rate. Further, the elemental properties of the heat sink were studied by altering its material to aluminium. The base-model heat sink could reduce PV cell temperature by 27 °C in an ambient temperature of 42 °C. The optimized fin spacing, baseplate thickness, fin height and fin thickness of 7, 0.0025 m, 0.12 m and 0.002 m further reduced the average panel temperatures by 3.5%, 4% and 9% respectively. The use of copper as an effective heat sink material was concluded compared to aluminium that conversely increased the average panel temperature by 2% despite the use of optimized heat sink structure.