Thermal performance analysis of hybrid jet impingement/microchannel cooling for concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) cells

The increase in the CPV temperature significantly reduces the efficiency of CPV system. To maintain the CPV temperature under a permissible limit and to utilize the unused heat from the CPVs, an efficient cooling and transportation of coolant is necessary in the system. The present study proposes a new design of hybrid jet impingements/microchannels heat sink with pillars for cooling densely packed PV cells under high concentration. A three-dimensional numerical model was constructed to investigate the thermal performance under steady state, incompressible and laminar flow. A constant heat flux was applied at the base of the substrate to imitate heated CPV surface. The effect of two dimensionless variables, i.e., ratios of standoff (distance from the nozzle exit to impingement surface) to jet diameter and jet pitch to jet diameter was investigated at several flow conditions. The performance of hybrid heat sink was investigated in terms of heat transfer coefficient, pressure-drop, overall thermal resistance and pumping power. The characteristic relationship between the overall thermal resistance and the pumping power was presented which showed an optimum design corresponding to S/Dj = 12 having lower overall thermal resistance and lower pumping power.