The solar irradiation at the gulf Arabia is considered one of the highest in the world. However, this region is classified as a desert with high dust accumulation. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the effect of soiling and the photovoltaic (PV) tilt angle on the performance of 2.0 MWp of car park PV plant in Oman. Experimental measurements were taken and a model was developed for simulation. The power generation by the cleaned PV system was measured as 1460 kW around noon. After one week of operation, the power production (at the same irradiance level) reduced to 1390 kW due to soiling. It further reduced to 1196 kW and 904 kW after three and five weeks of operation, respectively. The results also show that a soiling-percentage of 7.5% reduced the monthly electricity generation (307 MWh) by 5.6% and a soiling-percentage of 12.5% reduced the generation by 10.8%. Furthermore, the increase in tilt is not recommended due to the duo-pitch canopy effect of the car park where the panels with 180° azimuth generate lower electricity than the panels with 0° azimuth. In addition, the part of the car park with 180° azimuth caused shading to the other part for high tilt angles.
A small-scale phase change material (PCM)-based heat sink can regulate the temperature of electronics due to high latent-heat capacity. Three different heat sinks are examined to study the effects of PCM combination, arrangement of PCMs in multiple-PCM heat sink, PCM thickness, melting temperature and intensity of heat source on the thermal behavior of heat sink. Results are obtained for the temperature distribution across the heat sink and the PCM melting profile. It is concluded that (i) PCM combination RT50-RT55 increases the thermal regulation period and also reduces the heat sink temperature at the end of the operation, (ii) the RT58-RT47 arrangement slightly reduces the maximum temperature as compared to RT47-RT58, (iii) As PCM thickness increases from 30 mm to 60 mm, the thermal-regulation-period increases by 50 min, (iv) As the PCM melting temperature increases, the thermal-regulation-period and the heat sink temperature increase and (v) The thermal-regulation-period decreases as the power rating increases from 1 to 2 W.
Concentrating photovoltaic has a major challenge due to the high temperature raised during the process which reduces the efficiency of the solar cell. A multi-layered microchannel heat sink technique is considered more efficient in terms of heat removal and pumping power among many other cooling techniques. Thus, in the current work, multi-layered microchannel heat sink is used for concentrating photovoltaic cooling. The thermal behavior of the system is experimentally and numerically investigated. The results show that in extreme heating load of 30 W/cm2 with heat transfer fluid flow rate of 30 mL/min, increasing the number of layers from one to four reduces the heat source temperature from 88.55 to 73.57 °C. In addition, the single layered MLM heat sink suffers from the highest non-uniformity in the heat source temperature compared to the heat sinks with the higher number of layers. Additionally, the results show that increasing the number of layers from one to four reduces the pressure drop from 162.79 to 32.75 Pa.
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