Study on Natural Convection Cooling of Low Power PV Inverter

Protection level of low power PV inverters is required to reach IP54 or higher. If fans are applied, the reliability and stability of the system will decrease. The technology of natural convection cooling provides technical ways to solve such problems. In this paper, 12 kW low power PV inverter is reasonably simplified, so that a simulation model is built and simulated with commercial software ICEPAK. The simulation model is optimized according to the results of prototype test and the simulation results are validated through prototype experiment. It is found that simulation results accord well with experiment data, and bring on high precision, which can be used as thermal design reference for natural convection cooling of low power PV inverters.