Experimental Study of Phase Change Microcapsule Suspensions Applied in BIPV Construction

Abstract

In this paper, a phase change microcapsule suspension MPCMS25 with a mass fraction of 10% was prepared with TH-ME25 as the phase change microcapsule particles and deionized water as the base fluid. The experimental benches of the Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) system and BIPV-MPCMS system were set up, and the comparative tests were carried out in Nanjing to study the optimization effect of phase change microcapsule suspension on the thermal and electrical properties of the BIPV system. The results show that MPCMS25 reduces the component temperature of the system by 8.8 °C and the backplane temperature by 11.1 °C. The optimization time of the component operating temperature and the backplane temperature is 9.5 h and 9.75 h, respectively. Delay appearance of peak module operating temperature by 114 min and peak backplane temperature by 125 min. In addition, the suspension can also improve the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of photovoltaic modules by 0~5%. After a simulation study on the energy consumption of a high-speed railway station, it is found that using the BIPV-MPCMS system as the building envelope can achieve an energy saving rate of about 8.5%.