Date of Award

10-5-2017

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Mechanical, Automotive, and Materials Engineering

Supervisor

Ting, David

Supervisor

Ray, Steve

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

The cooling of solar photovoltaic panels is not only critical, due to the dropping of cell efficiency with the increased temperature, but also challenging, since the heat transfer enhancement must be accomplished without blocking the sun radiation. Longitudinal vortices can be generated by small geometries and last a long distance, thus it is suitable to be applied on solar photovoltaic panels. Delta winglet is one of the most effective longitudinal vortex generators. This work presents four papers, one on the importance of cooling solar panels and three on the investigations and optimizations of the delta winglet. In the first paper, the mitigation effect by solar panels on climate change, as well as the possible beneficial outcomes by employing turbulence generators is discussed. The second paper studies the flow structure of the longitudinal vortex generated by a delta winglet with an aspect ratio of 2 and an attack angle of 30 degrees. It is followed by a paper that investigates the influence of aspect ratio on the flow behavior, and its effect on heat transfer is studied in Appendix A. The final paper presents the impact of attack angle on the heat transfer and correlates the heat transfer with the flow parameters.

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