Efficiency Improvement Based on Cooling Effect via Immersion Technique in a PV Solar Panel: Tropical and Cloudy Weather Setting

Abstract: For decades, world’s energy crisis was a major concern to the world and lots of study have been carried out in renewable energy sources field particularly on solar energy. However, the solar panel only receives around 20% from the energy of sunlight. Research shows that the efficiency of Photovoltaic (PV) solar panel is actually inversely proportional to temperature and resulted in low efficiency in the energy conversion. This is further negatively compounded by the presence of widely scattered clouds and the location of the sun which is directly overhead at noon times in the regions marked along the earth geographical’s Equator line for example Malaysia and others. In this project, panel efficiency improvement caused by cooling via immersion technique was studied and the experimental setup system was installed on the rooftop of one the building at University College of Technology Sarawak, Sibu. Different cooling media were used in order to gauge the performance of different cooling effect caused by different cooling media to the efficiency of solar panel. Up-to-now, there is no technical data reported so far in the tropical weather particularly in Malaysia on this subject considering different weather, humidity and geographic location.

Keywords: Renewable Energy; Immersion Cooling Technique; Efficiency Improvement; Tropical Weather Setting.