Advanced heat sink designs for high-efficiency thermal management in concentrated photovoltaic systems

In concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) systems, thermal management is typically achieved through active cooling techniques to prevent efficiency degradation and cell damage. However, a key limitation of these techniques is their inability to maintain uniform temperatures across all cells. This study explores advanced liquid-cooled aluminum heat sink designs with novel fin arrangements under varying concentration ratios, to identify the optimal configuration for maximum temperature uniformity. The findings reveal that while integral fin designs achieve lower cell temperatures and reduce thermal stress, interrupted fin designs offer superior temperature uniformity and help decrease pumping power and unit weight. Specifically, the improvements in temperature uniformity for interrupted fin designs with 1, 2, 3, and 4 fin rows are 15 %, 17.2 %, 30.6 %, and 29.1 %, respectively. The best temperature uniformity is achieved with enhanced fin designs that incorporate a higher fin density in the downstream region of the heat sink, ensuring a temperature difference of less than 1 K between cells. The optimal design achieves an overall thermal-hydraulic performance of 1.38 under high and ultra-high conditions, with a maximum thermal stress of 37.59 MPa. Additionally, this configuration results in the smallest weight increase of the cooling unit (22.5 %) compared to the finless model.