Thermal performance of a smart sunflower system proposed for urban planning.

Smartflower (sunflower) is a compact energy generating system, it consists of a base structure, that houses a foldable array of solar cells that are deployed upon use and is able to track the movement of the sun along the hemisphere. The smart sunflower system's panels differ significantly from the traditional PV panels. In this paper, the thermal behavior analysis of the smart sunflower solar PV panels system is proposed using ANSYS-2020 R2 steady-state thermal analysis. This analysis was applied for the computation of the PV panel temperature distribution which was subjected to various atmospheric conditions. Existing formulations in the available literature are taken into account and, are based on NOCT conditions for several wind speeds and solar irradiance. The performance of the PV sunflower panel is compared with the usual solar panels at the same rated power. The proposed analysis is also used to consider the effect of panel shape and the role of thermal inertia in the performance of the PV panels. Results showed that the sunflower thermal performance is improved in comparison with the usual panels for the same rated power and ambient conditions due to improvement in the thermal characteristics of the sunflower panel such as heat convection coefficient. This study of the sunflower performance stimulates to direct the design to the manufacturing processes and experimentally test the sunflower performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]