Effect of Zn-H20 Nanofluid Back-Flow Channels on the Efficiency and Electrical Power Output of a Solar PV Panel Used in Standalone PV System

In this paper a solar photovoltaic based power generation system with improved panel efficiency using back flow channel is proposed. Main contribution of this work is to improve the electrical efficiency of a standalone PV system by reducing the panel temperature using Zinc-water (Zn-H20) nanofluid as a back channel fluid. Forcing nanofluid to flow through the tubes attached at the back of the panel reduces panel temperature considerably results in efficiency improvement of the panel. To analyze the performance of the proposed Zn-H20 nanofluid flow channel based PV Panel used in PV systems, MATLAB Simulink model is developed and simulation under varying conditions of temperature and irradiance for Sub-tropical region (27.8974° N, 78.0880° E) has been carried out. Results obtained with Zn-H20 nanofluid flow channel are compared with the system with air flow and without air flow channel PV panels. Proposed system using nanofluid shows efficiency improvement of 0.4-0.6% and 1-1.1 % to that with air flow channel and without air flow channel respectively. It is envisage that the proposed Panel system can be very useful for design and implementation of an efficient standalone solar PV system in sub-tropical region.