Coupled thermal, electrical and exergetic analysis of a photovoltaic panel using ternary nanofluids: a two-phase approach

This numerical study investigates the thermal, electrical, exergetic, and sustainability performance of a photovoltaic (PV) module cooled with a ternary hybrid nanofluid, compared with natural convection and conventional water cooling. A fully coupled three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework is developed, incorporating discrete ordinates (DO) radiation modelling to account for radiative heat transfer and a two-phase mixture approach to capture nanofluid transport behaviour. The CFD-predicted PV surface temperature is integrated with a temperature-dependent single-diode electrical model to evaluate electrical performance. Results indicate that ternary nanofluid cooling provides an additional reduction of approximately 3 K in peak PV temperature compared to water cooling under peak irradiance. The maximum power point improves by 20–32% relative to natural convection and by 2–3% relative to water cooling, attributed to improved thermal field uniformity and the suppression of downstream hot spots. Exergy analysis reveals a peak exergetic efficiency of approximately 24% for nanofluid cooling, reflecting reduced entropy generation and enhanced thermo-electrical coupling. Integrated energy, exergo-economic, and environmental assessments confirm that ternary nanofluid cooling offers a technically feasible and sustainable strategy for photovoltaic thermal management under high thermal loading conditions.