Thermal management of concentrated photovoltaic cells using zigzag microchannel MEMS heatsink embedded with square pinfins

This work proposes a zigzag microchannel MEMS heatsink embedded with square pin fins for effective thermal management of concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) cells. The model based parametric study is conducted over the Reynolds number range from 250 to 1000 for a concentration ratio of 20. Water is employed as a liquid coolant and the MEMS heatsink is designed in silicon. The model consisting of energy, continuity and Navier-stokes equations are solved using Fluent module of ANSYS workbench. The merit of employing zigzag microchannel embedded with square pin fin outweighs than that of conventional straight microchannel MEMS heatsink where the former achieving 53% reduction in maximum substrate temperature at 87.3% penalty rise in pressure drop. The results demonstrated the increase in the pin fin hydraulic diameter and hydraulic diameter of the microchannel contributed to the reduction in the maximum substrate temperature at the expense of higher pressure drop.