A Novel Cooling System by Surface Corrugation and Nanofluid Utilization for the Performance Improvement of Photovoltaic Module Coupled with Thermoelectric Generator and Efficient Computations by Using Artificial Neural Network-Based Hybrid Scheme

For a photovoltaic module coupled with thermoelectric generator, a unique wavy cooling channel is proposed, and its performance is numerically assessed by using three-dimensional computations. The cooling channel uses nanofluid of alumina–water with various shaped nanoparticles (spherical, cylindrical and brick). Numerical simulations are performed for a range of parameters for the corrugation amplitude ( 0 ≤ Amp ≤ 0.1 0 ≤ Amp ≤ 0.1 ), wave frequency ( 2 ≤ Nf ≤ 16 2 ≤ Nf ≤ 16 ), nanoparticle loading quantity ( 0 ≤ SVF ≤ 0.03 0 ≤ SVF ≤ 0.03 ), and nanoparticle shape (spherical, brick, and cylindrical). We analyze the photovoltaic module’s average temperature and temperature uniformity for a variety of parameter variations. When nanofluid and greater channel corrugation amplitudes are utilized, the average panel surface temperature is decreased more. A wavy shape of the cooling channel at the maximum corrugation amplitude yields a cell temperature reduction of 1.88 ᵒ o C, while frequency has little impact on average cell temperature and its uniformity. The best-performing particles are those with cylindrical shapes, and the drop-in average photovoltaic temperature with solid volume fraction is essentially linear. As utilizing cylindrical-shaped particles, the average temperature of corrugated cooling channels decreases by around 1.9 ᵒ o C as compared to flat cooling channels with base fluid at the greatest solid volume fraction. As compared to un-cooled photovoltaic, cell temperature drops by around 43.2 ᵒ o C when employing thermoelectric generator. However, temperature drop value of 59.8 ᵒ o C can be obtained by using thermoelectric generator and nano-enhanced wavy cooling channel utilizing cylindrical-shaped nanoparticles. An hybrid computational strategy for the fully coupled system of photovoltaic with cooling system is provided, which reduces the computational time by a factor of 75.