Performance Evaluation of Photovoltaic System Designed for DC Refrigerator

Refrigeration is closely related to the demand for cooling commodities. Solar refrigeration is thought of as one of the best alternatives to address this issue and it may be accomplished by using one of the refrigeration systems like vapor compression, absorption or thermoelectric refrigeration system. Introducing solar refrigerators into the cold chain indicate that solar refrigerators can provide a more sustainable vaccine cold chain. The solar photovoltaic (PV) system generates both electrical and thermal energy from solar radiation. Therefore an energy and exergy analysis of the system was carried out. Energy analysis was concerned only with the quantity of energy use and efficiency of energy processes. Exergy is the maximum work potential which can be obtained from energy. The experimental data were used for the calculation of the energy and exergy efficiencies of the PV systems. The average photovoltaic efficiency was found to be 8.4 and 8.2 % for no load and full load conditions while exergy efficiency was 11.4 and 11.2 %, respectively for May month. Photovoltaic efficiency and exergy efficiency were calculated for March and April month also. Hence it is concluded that there was no impact of load on the performance of photovoltaic panel. It was observed that the PV module temperature had a great effect on the exergy efficiency, could be improved by maintaining module temperature close to ambient and that could be achieved by removing the heat from PV module surface. It was concluded that the exergy losses increased with increasing module temperature.