Effect of applying serpentine channels and hybrid nanofluid for thermal management of photovoltaic cell: Numerical simulation, ANN and sensitivity analysis

Regarding the importance of thermal management of solar PV cells to achieve higher efficiency and electricity output, a novel configuration by use of serpentine channels for cooling is proposed and numerically investigated in the present article. Moreover, a hybrid nanofluid, (MWCNT)-Fe3O4/water, is employed as the coolant to investigate its potential in further improvement of thermal management. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is applied to numerically simulate the systems and investigate the impacts of different factors. Performance of the proposed configuration is compared with cooling channels with simple structure without nanofluids. Simulations results revealed that the employment of serpentine channels leads to modification in the thermal management of the cell compared with the simple channel. The maximum improvement rate in this condition compared with simple channels is around 9.63 % that is obtained in case of maximum mass flow rate of coolant and solar radiation intensity. Despite increment in pressure loss by using the serpentine channel compared with the simple channel, 2.6 ×10−3 W and 9.3 ×10−4 W, respectively, in mass flow rate of 0.003 kg/s for water, increase in the generated electricity is much more in this case. Furthermore, numerical results show that applying the hybrid nanofluid with 0.1 % concentration can cause slight reduction in the temperature compared with using water. Moreover, Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network as intelligent methods used for estimation of the cell temperature and the maximum error for the developed model is approximately 1.1 % and 0.098 % for the GMDH- and MLP-based models, respectively. Finally, sensitivity analysis is implemented and it is shown that solar radiation intensity is the most influential factor on the cell temperature in condition of using serpentine channels while mass flow rate of the coolant has the minimum relevancy factor and consequently effect on the temperature of the solar cell.