A Combined Optical, Thermal and Electrical Performance Study of a V-Trough PV System—Experimental and Analytical Investigations

The objective of this study was to achieve higher efficiency of a PV system while reducing of the cost of energy generation. Concentration photovoltaics was employed in the present case as it uses low cost reflectors to enhance the efficiency of the PV system and simultaneously reduces the cost of electricity generation. For this purpose a V-trough integrated with the PV system was employed for low concentration photovoltaic (LCPV). Since the electrical output of the concentrating PV system is significantly affected by the temperature of the PV cells, the motivation of the research also included studying the ability to actively cool PV cells to achieve the maximum benefit. The optical, thermal and electrical performance of the V-trough PV system was theoretically modeled and validated with experimental results. Optical modeling of V-trough was carried out to estimate the amount of enhanced absorbed radiation. Due to increase in the absorbed radiation the module temperature was also increased which was predicted by thermal model. Active cooling techniques were studied and the effect of cooling was analyzed on the performance of V-trough PV system. With absorbed radiation and module temperature as input parameters, electrical modeling was carried out and the maximum power was estimated. For the V-trough PV system, experiments were performed for validating the numerical models and very good agreement was found between the two.