Thermal design of a plate receiver for cooling densely packed photovoltaic cells with a point focusing solar concentrator

The viability of a plate receiver for an array of densely packed photovoltaic cells with a point focusing solar concentrator has been investigated. A cooling receiver being similar to a multi-channel receiver was designed and a thermal resistance model was developed to optimize the geometric parameters. Furthermore, the simulation results found that when the receiver fin height, channel width, and width of the fin wall is 15, 1, and 5.8 mm, respectively, the total thermal resistance could be less than 4 cm °C/W under a constant volumetric flow rate of 0.1 L/s. A physical prototype has been built according to the simulation results. A performance test has been conducted to investigate the temperature distribution and the thermal performance. The experimental results reveal that the new design of the plate receiver has a desirable working performance and it is acceptable for the cooling application of photovoltaic cells which expose to high heat fluxes.