For a photovoltaic module coupled with thermoelectric generator, a unique wavy cooling channel is proposed, and its performance is numerically assessed by using three-dimensional computations. The cooling channel uses nanofluid of alumina–water with various shaped nanoparticles (spherical, cylindrical and brick). Numerical simulations are performed for a range of parameters for the corrugation amplitude ( \(0 \le \text {Amp} \le 0.1\) ), wave frequency ( \(2 \le \text {Nf} \le 16\) ), nanoparticle loading quantity ( \(0 \le \text {SVF} \le 0.03\) ), and nanoparticle shape (spherical, brick, and cylindrical). We analyze the photovoltaic module’s average temperature and temperature uniformity for a variety of parameter variations. When nanofluid and greater channel corrugation amplitudes are utilized, the average panel surface temperature is decreased more. A wavy shape of the cooling channel at the maximum corrugation amplitude yields a cell temperature reduction of 1.88 \(^\text {o}\) C, while frequency has little impact on average cell temperature and its uniformity. The best-performing particles are those with cylindrical shapes, and the drop-in average photovoltaic temperature with solid volume fraction is essentially linear. As utilizing cylindrical-shaped particles, the average temperature of corrugated cooling channels decreases by around 1.9 \(^\text {o}\) C as compared to flat cooling channels with base fluid at the greatest solid volume fraction. As compared to un-cooled photovoltaic, cell temperature drops by around 43.2 \(^\text {o}\) C when employing thermoelectric generator. However, temperature drop value of 59.8 \(^\text {o}\) C can be obtained by using thermoelectric generator and nano-enhanced wavy cooling channel utilizing cylindrical-shaped nanoparticles. An hybrid computational strategy for the fully coupled system of photovoltaic with cooling system is provided, which reduces the computational time by a factor of 75.
