Passive radiative cooling and other photonic approaches for the temperature control of photovoltaics: a comparative study for crystalline silicon-based architectures

Optics Express
George PerrakisMaria Kafesaki

Abstract

The radiative cooling of objects during daytime under direct sunlight has recently been shown to be significantly enhanced by utilizing nanophotonic coatings. Multilayer thin film stacks, 2D photonic crystals, etc. as coating structures improved the thermal emission rate of a device in the infrared atmospheric transparency window reducing considerably devices' temperature. Due to the increased heating in photovoltaic (PV) devices - that has significant adverse consequences on both their efficiency and life-time - and inspired by the recent advances in daytime radiative cooling, we developed a coupled thermal-electrical modeling to examine the physical mechanisms on how a radiative cooler affects the overall efficiency of commercial photovoltaic modules and how the radiative cooling impact is compared with the impact of other photonic strategies for reducing heat generation within PVs, such as ultraviolet and sub-bandgap reflection. Employing our modeling, which takes into account all the major intrinsic processes affected by the temperature variation in a PV device, we additionally identified the validity regimes of the currently existing PV-cooling models which treat the PV coolers as simple thermal emitters. Finally, we assess...Continue Reading

References

Sep 24, 2015·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Linxiao ZhuShanhui Fan
Sep 5, 2018·Scientific Reports·Rodolphe VaillonMarc Calaf
May 6, 2019·Optics Express·Zhiguang ZhouPeter Bermel

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Citations

Jan 16, 2021·Applied Optics·Mounir Zahir, Mourad Benlattar

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