Active Liquid Based Thermal Management of PV Modules

The world today is heading towards renewable energy and replacing fossil fuel energy and nonrenewable energy, and part of renewable energy is the photovoltaic cells because it's using the sunlight as a primary energy source, and then it will convert the sunlight into electricity using a technology based on the photoelectric effect, and it?s a type of inexhaustible and non - polluting energy that can be produced in installations ranging from small generators for self - consumption to large photovoltaic plants. Furthermore, the problem of photovoltaic cells is it suffers from overheating and that causes in decline in the efficiency. In our project we are trying to solve this problem by designing a heat sink that will cool down the photovoltaic cells and make it work more efficiently, so to start with our project, first did a lot of research for articles about this topic, to gather more information and know what have people done in the past to solve this problem, then we were able to come up with our requirements, after that we did a survey to gather more information form the customers and decided our final specifications, then we used MATLAB software to perform the calculation of the heat sink, after we are done with our calculation we were able to design the CAD model of our heat sink, then we tried to estimate our cost for this project to know the budget needed for this project. Furthermore, after finishing designing the CAD model of our heat sink, we send our CAD design for fabrication, and after that we started working on ANSYS Fluent software to get more detailed and accurate calculations, and we chose the ANSYS approach because our governing equations are too complex for an analytical solution, and the purpose of using ANSYS is to see the change in the thermal resistance with the Reynolds number, and to see the change in the pumping power with the Reynolds number, and we can achieve this by simulating our channel in ANSYS. Moreover, after we got our results from ANSYS, we have received our heat sink after fabrication, so we went to the lab to start testing our heat sink and then perform the heatsink experiment, and through the testing we have faced some problems such as water leakage, but we were able to solve this problem, and after that we started working on the experiment, and the goal of this experiment was to see the change in the temperature difference with the Reynolds number.