Empirical survey on the effect of straight and wavy fins integrated with wind stream as heat sink of photovoltaic panels

Increase in temperature of PV cells leads to a notable fall in their electrical efficiency, which is known as a major fault of photovoltaic (PV) panels. Among several methods in cooling PV cells, this article deals with aimed to study the effect of two fin arrays, i.e. straight and wavy. Each one has been tested in two various numbers of 10 and 20, with and without wind blow of 2 km/h. Experiments were performed by a solar-simulator, under constant irradiation of 700 W/m². According to the temperature results, employing wavy fins due to its greater contact area showed lower temperature than straight fins. So that using 10 wavy fins leads to keep the temperature of PV panel 7 °C lower than those of 10 straight fins. From an electrical efficiency point of view, installing 20 wavy fins shows 2% more value than the base case. Furthermore, both PV cell temperature and electrical efficiency for all cases were calculated by means of empirical and analytical equations, too, and a good agreement was illustrated with the experimental findings of this research. Finally, annual reduction in CO₂ emission as an important environmental aspect was calculated by means of RETScreen software, too.