Experimental validation of a heat transfer model for concentrating photovoltaic system

In this paper, a three dimensional heat transfer model is presented for a novel concentrating photovoltaic design for Active Solar Panel Initiative System (ASPIS). The concentration ratio of two systems (early and integrated prototype) are 5x and 10x respectively, designed for roof-top integrated Photovoltaic systems. ANSYS 12.1, CFX package was effectively used to predict the temperatures of the components of the both ASPIS systems at various boundary conditions. The predicted component temperatures of an early prototype were compared with experimental results of ASPIS, which were carried out in Solecta - Israel and at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) - Austria. It was observed that the solar cell and lens temperature prediction shows good agreement with Solecta measurements. The minimum and maximum deviation of 3.8% and 17.9% were observed between numerical and Solecta measurements and the maximum deviations of 16.9% were observed between modeling and AIT measurements. Thus, the developed validated thermal model enables to predict the component temperatures for concentrating photovoltaic systems. Crown Copyright (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.