Manel Ibañez

Distributed and self-adaptive microfluidic cell cooling for CPV dense array receivers

Temperature non uniformities of the CPV receivers lead to mismatch losses. In order to deal with this issue, a cooling device, formed by a matrix of microfluidic cells with individually variable coolant flow rate, has been developed. This device tailors the distribution of the heat extraction capacity over the CPV receiver to the local cooling needs in order to reduce the temperature non uniformities with respect to microchannel devices when submitted to uniform or non-uniform illumination profiles. At equal average temperature of the CPV receiver, power generation applying the matrix of microfluidic cells with individually variable coolant flow rate is 9.7% higher than the one with conventional microchannel technology.

Design Of A Hybrid Jet Impingement / Microchannel Cooling Device For Densely Packed PV Cells Under High Concentration

A hybrid jet impingement / microchannel cooling scheme was designed and applied to densely packed PV cells under high concentration. An experimental study allows validating the principles of the design and confirming its applicability to the cited system. In order to study the characteristics of the device in a wide range of conditions, a numerical model was developed and experimentally validated. The results allow evaluating the contributions of the cooling device to the performances of densely packed PV cells under high concentration. The main advantages of the system are related to its compactness, its good capacity of heat extraction associated to relatively low pressure losses and its capability to improve the temperature uniformity of the PV receiver with respect to other cooling schemes. These features improve the net electric output of the whole system and its reliability.