Development Of A Mathematical Model For A Photovoltaic/Thermal (PV/T) System Operating Under Different Environmental And Operational Conditions

Abstract

There is an increasing demand towards sources of clean energy due to increasing concerns about the environment as well as the rising prices of traditional power supplies. A recently developed type of solar conversion technique called hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) converts incoming solar radiation onto both useable thermal and electrical power at the same time. This technology's fundamental result is a decrease in installed solar energy system performance with elevated irradiation levels due to the crystallized PV cells' negative thermal coefficient of power conversion efficiency. Furthermore, at least eighty percent of the sunlight that enters the system is lost and converted to heat by readily available solar PV panels, which raises the module's working temperature. These modules had relatively poor effectiveness of just more above 20%. The PV unit's heat exchanger connects to an external low-temperature fluids, such as either air or water, which is pumped through system to remove excess heat and cool the solar panel. The recovered heat could be utilized to low-temperature tasks such as drying for the agricultural and industrial industries or interior for air conditioning and heating within buildings. This investigation employed the steady-state thermal simulation of a PV/T airflow collector for solar energy to examine how different factors affected the system's efficiency. The mathematical model was constructed and verified using data from experiments. The findings show that whilst the design's parameters perform at their best, raising the air mass circulation rate would significantly improve the system's general efficiency.