Author : Amit Sahay, V.K. Sethi and A.C. Tiwari

Cooling of Photovoltaic cells is a problem of great significance,. The efficiency of wafer-based crystalline as well as Thin film Solar cells get reduced with increase of panel temperature. It is noted that the efficiency drops by about 0.4% for increase of 1° C of panel temperature. It is necessary to operate them at low temperatures in order to keep the PV module electrical efficiency at acceptable level. Therefore need for a low-cost cooling system for the Solar panels is felt. ( Katkar A A et al 2011 ) .(Tang Y et al 2003) (Tonui J K et al, 2006) Air-cooling either by forced or natural flow, presents a non-expensive and simple method of PV cell cooling. A design for Ground-Coupled Central Panel Cooling System (GC-CPCS) has been proposed by Sahay Amit et al 2013. This plant is already installed and operational at Energy Park of Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya(RGPV), Bhopal, India. This paper presents the fabrication scheme, Instrumentation and Testing of Ground-Coupled Central Panel Cooling System (GC-CPCS).

Keywords: Efficiency of Solar panels, Central Panel Cooling System (CPCS), Ground-Coupled Central Panel Cooling System (GC-CPCS), Smoke Flow Visualization, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.2 (April- 2014)