Enhancing the Performance of Photovoltaic Panels by Cooling: a Review.

Recently the world moves toward high utilization of renewable energy application due to environmental and economic issues. Photovoltaic (PV) is one of the most common renewable technologies, which produces electricity from solar irradiance. Due to environmental friendliness, sustainability, and lack of fuel costs, the number of applications and studies relating to PV plants is rapidly growing. Apart from the numerous benefits provided by PV, it faces some issues. Dust and surface temperature are the most important issues which cause a detrimental impact on the conversion system's performance. The cell temperature also, reflects on the PV degradation rate and the system life time. PV surface Cooling is an important way to be considered while running solar photovoltaic systems in order to obtain improved efficiency. There are different cooling techniques are suggested in literatures including active cooling, passive cooling and hybrid cooling techniques up to the most recent researches. The common methods for PV cooling are reviewed, studied, and evaluated in this paper. Different features and capabilities of cooling technologies are presented, in addition to highlight the opportunities to enhance or upgrade the cooling techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]