A comparative investigation of the cooling effect of multi-layer arrangements of panels in a ground-mounted photovoltaic system

The significant increase in the operating temperature of solar cells has a negative effect on the electrical efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) cells. To maintain the high-power generation efficiency of the PV cells, cooling technology will be used in some PV power stations. However, common cooling technologies, such as water cooling and phase change material cooling, have the disadvantage of high costs and are unsuitable for large-scale applications in PV power stations. In this paper, a novel stair-stepping multi-layer arrangement for PV panels has been proposed to decrease the temperature of the PV panels. In contrast to the arrangement scheme of single-layer PV modules, the impact of the PV array arrangements on heat dissipation and power generation efficiency has been studied. The ground-mounted stand-alone PV modules have been investigated through computational fluid dynamics simulation. The results show that the triple-layer arrangement has better cooling performance. Under different wind speeds of 3 m/s, the triple-layer arrangement can reduce the temperature by more than 6 K, increase the photoelectric conversion efficiency by more than 0.5%, and increase the output power by 3%. The study demonstrates how novel multi-layer arrangements can enhance PV efficiency by improving the convective heat transfer of PV panels, providing a low-cost and effective alternative to PV power stations for heat dissipation.