Design and Setup of a Photovoltaic-Thermal System Using PCM for the Efficiency Enhancement of Solar Panels

High operating temperature lead to a loss of efficiency in solar photovoltaic panels. When ambient temperature rises above 30oC, panel’s temperature increases to above 70oC. In this paper, a system was designed for the heat recovery from solar cells by the use of phase change materials. Due to the huge latent heat of fusion in PCM, these materials can absorb huge amount of heat from back surface of panels that lead to decrease panel’s operating temperature. This system includes some aluminum ducts filled with PCM. These ducts are fixed to the back surface of the panel. Furthermore water pipe implanted through these channels in order to recover heat from PCM. Result showed that the system reduced cell’s temperature about 18oC to 20oC and subsequently electrical efficiency increased by 10 to 15 percent. Meanwhile system could maintain solar cell temperature under 40oC for 50min and when water was flowing through the pipe, this time increased to 85min. In this situation, thermalefficiency of the system was about 33% which made the total efficiency at 44%.

کلیدواژه ها:

Phase Change Material ، Cell Efficiency ، Thermal-Photovoltaic ، Solar Energy