Design and Modeling for the Performance Enhancement of Solar Photovoltaic/Thermal (PV/T) Collectors

Abstract

In this paper, a simulation of a photovoltaic–thermal (PV/T) hybrid solar system with longitudinal fins absorbers was developed to determine optimal geometry parameters for conventional design of this system. In this case, we used a dynamic model based on the principle of the airflow rate to determine the optimum design of the PV/T system for each airflow velocity. In this regard, the influences of the geometric parameters (number, height) on the collector performance of each model with different flow velocities were investigated. The mathematical model is developed using the energy balance equations of the PV/T air collector. A good agreement is obtained between the simulation results and the reference data from the literature after the system PV/T air collector is evaluated by calculating the root mean square error. The studied cases indicate that for the four simulated models, the best highest performance rate is providing with the first model at 2[Formula: see text]m/s airflow velocity. The thermal and electric efficiencies were reached 83% and 12.85%, respectively, with the maximum temperature value on the photovoltaic cell as [Formula: see text]C. However, a combined efficiency for the hybrid PV/T solar collector, which is the sum of the electrical efficiency and thermal efficiency, is equal to 95.98%.