Reducing the thermal load of a photovoltaic module through an optical water filter

This paper presents new experimental investigations to reduce the accumulation of heat in a photovoltaic module. The optical water filter is placed above the photovoltaic module used to absorb the undesired infrared spectra and converts it to heat, and also transmits the visible spectra to the photovoltaic module to produce electricity simultaneously. In this work, the temperature of the solar cells was measured at various water thickness in the filter (1-5 cm) and different distance between the filter and the photovoltaic module (1-3 cm). Results show that there is a significant effect of the water layer thickness on the temperature reduction of the solar cells (14-30.2%), while showed lower impact of the distance between the filter and the photovoltaic module (6.2-12.2%).