Assessment of the Thermal Efficiency of a Concentrated Photovoltaic/Thermal (CPV/T) Hybrid System with Water as Heat Transfer Fluid

Interest in solar energy is growing by the day, because it is clean and unlimited. Concentrated photovoltaic-thermal (CPV/T) systems are one of the systems that are attracting a great deal of attention among solar energy systems. In this work, a study of a hybrid concentrated photovoltaic-thermal (CPV/T) system that enables the simultaneous production of electrical and thermal energy has been presented. As the experimental realization of such devices is costly, it is necessary to develop numerical models.

The aim of this work is to evaluate the thermal efficiency of the system based on the thermal model, using an iterative simulation procedure.

Propose a numerical model to evaluate the thermal efficiency of a CPV/T hybrid system.

Starting from the energy conservation equations, a numerical modelling and simulation of the concentrated photovoltaic-thermal hybrid (CPV/T) system is carried out. A parametric analysis is carried out to study the influence of concentration, water mass flow rate, cell surface area and Reynolds number on the system's thermal and electrical performance.

The results show that thermal efficiency decreases with increasing Reynolds number and mass flow rate. However, it increases when the water mass flow rate is equal to 0.0001kg/s, from 0.4% to 0.7%, for a flow rate equal to 0.0010kg/s.

An interesting and useful finding was that the proposed numerical model allow the determination of the electrical as well as thermal efficiency of the hybrid CPV/T.