Numerical and Experimental Study on Effect of Adding Vaseline and Paraffin on the Performance of Concentrated Photovoltaic Cells

Abstract

The use of phase-changing materials is one of the methods used for passive cooling of concentrated photovoltaic cells. In this research, two types of phase changing materials were used, 50% Vaseline and 50% paraffin, where a numerical and experimental study was conducted to show the effect of using these two types of phase changing materials. In this research, a numerical as well as experimental study was carried out to study the improvement of the performance of the photovoltaic cell. for the numerical study, it was carried out using the ANSYS 2022 program, where the analysis was done in a three-dimensional geometrical (3D), and three models were analysed which are concentration photovoltaic without adding PCM (case 1), concentration photovoltaic cell with a mixture of paraffin and petroleum jelly at 50% (case 2), concentration photoelectric cell with PCM and fins (CPV/FPCM) (case 3), Experimental and numerical results showed convergence in the results and that the use of the mixture of phase-changing materials leads to a decrease in temperature by rate (7.97C°)(8.7331C°) for the second and third cases, respectively, and also leads to an increase in efficiency by rate (5.561%).