Performance investigation of a novel passive cooling strategy for photovoltaic panels using hollow staggered triangular fins

The operating temperature of photovoltaic (PV) panels critically affects their power output and efficiency. Conventional passive cooling fins often rely on a single heat transfer enhancement mechanism, leading to limited performance. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes and validates a novel hollow interlaced triangular fin (HTF) structure, this structure effectively disrupts the thermal boundary layer, induces fluid turbulence, and promotes air percolation and mixing, thereby significantly enhancing heat dissipation performance under low-velocity natural convection. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and outdoor experiments were employed to optimize the design. Simulation results indicate the triangular fin structure improves cooling efficiency by approximately 12 % compared to rectangular fins. The optimal design was identified as having a spatial orientation of bc ⊥ g, a perforation rate of 0.04, and a spacing of 100 mm. Field experiments under real-world conditions validated the design. Compared to a baseline module, the optimized finned module achieved an average daily temperature reduction of 2.5 °C and a corresponding power generation increase of 8.58 %, with a peak instantaneous temperature reduction of 3.1 °C. This work introduces a viable passive cooling solution to enhance the energy output and economic viability of PV systems.