The performance of a buried heat exchanger system for PV panel cooling under elevated air temperatures

•A buried air heat exchanger (BHE) was examined as cooling system for PV module.•The performance of the (PVC /BHE) investigated for various elevated air temperatures.•The performance of (PVC /BHE) was compared to a reference (PVR) without cooling.•PVC daily average surface temperature clearly dropped for all elevated temperatures.•(BHE) system is feasible to improve both PVC electrical and thermal performance. Performance of photovoltaic (PV) panels relies on the surrounding working temperature. In hot climatic regions most of the incident solar radiation is dissipated as accumulating heat on the PV panel causing adversely affect on PV performance due to elevated temperatures. An effective cooling technique is needed in order to keep the performance of PV module at acceptable level. In the current paper, the viability of a newly PV cooling system based on integrating PV panel with a buried heat exchanger (BHE) has been experimentally investigated. To prove the idea, the atmospheric air with various elevated temperatures 35 °C, 40 °C and 45 °C and flow rates 0.0228 m3/s, 0.0248 m3/s, 0.0268 m3/s and 0.0288 m3/s is forced to the (BHE) and the exit pre-cooled air is then simultaneously introduced to regulate the temperature of the PV back surface. The accomplished experiments revealed that integrating (BHE) to the PV panel is a promising active cooling system that can effectively regulate the operating temperature and consequently improve the PV electrical conversion efficiency. Empirical correlations for the PV module electrical and thermal efficiency as a function of the ambient air temperature (ºC), solar irradiance (W/m2), and air flow rate (m3/s) are proposed in a good agreement with the experimental results.