A novel water cooling approach for optimising photovoltaic panel performance using WE-HHO

Photovoltaic panel cooling is crucial for improving electrical effectiveness, minimising solar cell degradation, as well as prolonging the lifespan of PV systems. Conventional cooling methods often use large amounts of water, posing challenges for large-scale solar power plants. To maximise power output while reducing the time needed to lower the surface temperature of the panels, an active cooling method, the optimisation-assisted Water Spraying technique, is utilised. A Weighted Exploration-based Harris Hawks Optimization (WE-HHO), a conceptual enhancement of the conventional Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO), is suggested in order to accomplish these goals. The fundamental idea of HHO is derived from a new swarm-based optimisation technique known as surprise pounce, which was motivated by the supportive nature and chasing manner of Harris’ hawks. Finally, the proposed algorithm along with optimised cooling of the PV system was executed in MATLAB, and their performances are compared with various measures like solution quality, convergence accuracy and the net power produced after cooling.