Maximizing energy output of a vapor chamber-based high concentrated PV-thermoelectric generator hybrid system

Thermal management of triple-junction solar cell is crucial for enhancing electrical efficiency of a high concentrated photovoltaic (HCPV) system. In this paper, a HCPV system integrated with vapor chamber (VC) cooling and thermoelectric generator (TEG) is proposed to maximize the energy output. The VC as a passive cooling device can effectively extract the excessive heat from the triple-junction cell and the TEG module are used to convert the waste heat into electrical power thereby harvesting more energy. A detailed unsteady-state modeling of the VC based HCPV/TEG system is established in MATLAB. The effects of new VC structure, TEG type and concentration ratio on the dynamic performance of the system are discussed and a comparison with the CPV-TEG system without VC cooling is provided. Results reveal that effective cooling of the new VCs can maintain the sophisticated cell under 1000 suns at below 329 K and the average exergy efficiency of the system is 31.20%. It is observed that the appropriate selection of TEG module can improve the system performance. Using TEG5, the proportion of CPV power in total power for the proposed system reaches 99.02%, which increases by 2.81% compared with that of the reported CPV-TEG system without VC cooling.