Smart cooling combo supercharges solar cell output

Passive cooling strategies like radiative cooling are often used in solar cells to naturally minimize heat, but until recently, researchers did not have a systematic way of evaluating how different methods affected solar cell performance. Ye et al. developed an electrothermal model that evaluates solar cell performance under different passive cooling conditions, including situations where multiple cooling strategies are used.

The team found that different cooling strategies prevailed in different locations of a solar cell. For a solar cell’s front side, which faces the sun, anti-reflection was critical. In contrast, evaporative cooling, which works through the evaporation of water to the atmosphere, played a significant role on the back side. The work suggests that future solar cell designs should consider a combination of radiative and evaporative cooling, theoretically enhancing a solar cell’s output power from 181.8 W/m² to 204.1 W/m².

“[The use of] sky radiative cooling to improve the cell cooling performance was limited due to the high thermal emittance of commonly used covers, such as glass, which can be counteracted by anti-reflection,” co-author Meijie Chen said. “Evaporative cooling at the backside of the solar cell showed great adaptability and cooling performance due to the high evaporative enthalpy of water, and more attention should be paid to the water recycling capacity in the atmosphere.”

The team developed the electrothermal model based on the first law of thermodynamics, creating code that included an intrinsic solar cell parameter, and optical and thermal calculations.

Their future work includes optimizing the solar cell’s material composition and structural design to develop multi-mode passive cooling strategies in an all-in-one system.

Source: “Theoretical analysis of solar cell performance assisted by passive cooling,” by Qin Ye, Hongjie Yan, and Meijie Chen, Applied Physics Letters (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0286585 .