Study of the Relationship Between Temperature and Efficiency in Photovoltaic Systems

Photovoltaic solar energy has been growing due to the demand for diversification of the global energy grid and the concern about replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. There is a great potential for this form of energy generation due to high levels of solar irradiation. However, the efficiency of commercial panels is still low and is negatively affected by temperature rises on the panel. To mitigate this effect, several cooling techniques have been previously proposed. This work focuses on studying the relation between the temperature of solar panels and the energy produced by them. It also uses thermoelectric cells acting as coolers for the system bringing down the panel temperature to increase its efficiency. The main goal is to build a plant consisting of a solar panel attached to one or more thermoelectric cells and connected to a data acquisition system. This setup will be used to evaluate the improvement in performance obtained through this strategy. The experiments will be carried out at the Petroleum Measurement Evaluation Laboratory - LAMP, and the results will be compared with mathematical and simulation models present in the literature.