Novel design of swirling jet impingement heat sink with and without internal Pin-Fins for thermal management of high-concentrator photovoltaic systems

Abstract

This study presents a novel design for a swirling jet impingement cooling heat sink with and without internal pin-fins, integrated into a high concentrator photovoltaic system. The investigation was carried out under a concentration ratio of 1000 suns and Reynolds numbers ranging from 1000 to 5000 with the inlet temperature of 25 °C. The performance of the heat sink was evaluated using different design target-to-jet diameter ratios of 2, 3, 4 and 5, with the aim of identifying the best design that provides effective cooling of the solar cell. The results obtained revealed that the average cell temperature decreases as the Reynolds number increases for both the heat sink with and without internal fins for all the target-to-jet diameter ratios. A comparison of the average cell temperature showed that the heat sink with internal fins achieved lower average cell temperatures than the heat sink without internal fins across all target-to-jet diameter ratios, except for a target-to-jet diameter ratio of 4 which recorded the lowest average cell temperature of 311.56 K, corresponding to the highest cell efficiency of 40.04 % at a Reynolds number of 5000. The numerical calculations were conducted using CFD code and verified with the available data in an open literature.