Abstract
•Two different cost-effective cooling techniques with new designs are proposed.•The harvested energy per day is increased by 10.2% with backwater cooling.•The harvested energy per day is increased by 7% with fins cooling.•The performance ratio was enhanced up to 84% for the water-cooling.
In this paper, two different cost-effective cooling techniques with new designs are proposed and experimentally evaluated to enhance the performance of solar PV system. The first technique is the direct active cooling with water whereas the second one is a passive cooling that uses fins mounted on the backside of the PV module. Besides, an extra PV module is employed without any cooling system as a reference margin for comparison purposes. The experimental measurements for three individuals PV modules have been collected and compared. The results indicated that the temperature of the PV module surface had been reduced using two cooling techniques compared with the non-cooling module. The maximum temperature values are 38, 55, and 58 °C for water-cooling, fins cooling, and non-cooling module, respectively. This reduction in the temperature with cooling systems improves the performance of the PV module. It was found that the harvested energy per day is increased by 10.2% and 7% for backwater cooling and fins cooling modules, respectively, compared with the non-cooling module. Besides, the performance ratio was enhanced up to 84% and 81% for the water-cooling module and fins cooling-module, respectively. While at the same time, it was 77% for the non-cooling module.