Heat Transfer and Flow Characteristics of Microjet Cooler with Silicon Carbide Nanofluid as Cooling Medium

During the working process of concentrated solar cells, most of the light energy is converted into heat energy, which leads to increase in device temperature, shortening in life and decrease in photoelectric conversion efficiency. Therefore, it is necessary to develop efficient cooling devices to effectively dissipate the heat to keep sufficiently low temperature of the solar cells. Jet cooling technology has the characteristics of high heat transfer coefficient and uniform distribution of temperature. Perfect cooling performance of microjet cooler can be obtained when using nanofluid as the cooling medium. Silicon carbide nanofluids were prepared by using dispersion method, while a heat sink coupled with impingent jet and microchannel structure was designed in this work. The heat transfer and flow characteristics of the heat sink with silicon carbide nanofluids and water as cooling medium were studied numerically. It is observed that the concentrating solar cell can work efficiently and stably after shinning concentrating light for 1800 times, when the silicon carbide nanofluid was employed as cooling medium. Compared with water, the silicon carbide nanofluid can reduce the surface temperature by 7 ℃ and increase the heat transfer coefficient by 12.2%. The numerical results provide a reliable theoretical basis and data support for the further study of microjet cooler.