Temperature regulation of PV solar cell under PCM cooling system

Today, phase change material (PCM) are integrated to cooling system of photovoltaic panels. There are many reasons (safe, abundant, affordable…) to use phase change material (PCM) in this field. The PCM may play an important role in increasing efficiency of PV cells. This paper describes a detailed physical issue in order to understand the effect of PCM in keeping PV cell temperature close to ambient. The study is focused on modeling the heat transfer in a PCM domain by using two different methods in the aim to study the PCM effect on temperature evolution of the PV system. By comparing between the two methods studied, we found that due to a phase change and free convection, transient incompressible flow is taken into account to explain the dynamic variations of the velocity profile. Moreover, with some standard conditions of irradiation and heat flux on both sides of PV panel, a melt front has been tracked by the energy equation in which gives a good argument for the temperature evolution during phase change.