Strategies for effective cooling of photovoltaic panels integrated with solar chimney

Abstract

Solar chimney is a self-functioning technology to meet human's daily power requirements. These days research on solar chimney for power generation has been more focused among scientific community. Many previous designs have been proposed to increase the performance of the solar chimney. To increase the turbine power Pwt generation the airflow velocity V at the turbine location has to be enhanced as Pwt / V3. The present study demonstrated a numerical study of hybrid solar chimney power plant (HSCPP) where collector inlet has been integrated with bell-mouth shape opening and photovoltaic (PV) panel at the collector bottom. New hybrid designs of converging collector channel-divergent chimney integrated with bell-mouth design inlet improved the flow velocity by 71% and decreases the PV panel temperature by 8-12 C. The increased flow velocity enhances the turbine power output beyond 200%. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.