Numerical study on natural convection heat dissipation of flared fin heat sink for high concentrating photovoltaic module cooling

ABSTRACT

High operating temperature of solar cell in high concentrating photovoltaic system reduces its electrical power efficiency and lifetime. Therefore, it is urgent to find an efficient cooling method to manage the temperature of solar cells. In this paper, we presented a structure and established a three-dimensional numerical model of flared heat sink to investigate the performance with different structural parameters. The simulation results reveal that the thermal resistance gradually decreases and tends to be constant as the increase in non-dimensional fin length. In addition, the thermal resistance of flared fin heat sink decreases with the increase in fin number to a certain value and then increases. The value of thermal resistance is minimum when the fin number of flared fin heat sink reaches to 13.

KEYWORDS:

• Flared fin
• heat sink
• heat transfer
• natural convection
• solar cell

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51272198 and No. 51772231), the International S&T Cooperation Program of China (2014DFA63070), and Dissertation Cultivation Funds of Wuhan University of Technology (2016-YS-035).