An experimental and numerical study on the impact of various parameters in improving the heat transfer performance characteristics of a water based photovoltaic thermal system

Abstract

The hybrid photovoltaic thermal system (PV/T) has been developed to harvest solar energy's electrical and thermal forms. However, effective heat evacuation from the backside of photovoltaic panels remains difficult, limiting their thermal and electrical performance. The current study presents a numerical and experimental examination of various parameters for improving a photovoltaic thermal system's heat transfer performance. The influence of flow parameters, tube diameters, and base plate thickness on the heat transfer, electrical, and overall performance characteristics of the water-based PV/T has been investigated. According to the current research, the water-based PV/T with a 16 mm tube diameter and a water flow rate of 1.02 L per minute has the highest average thermal, electrical, and overall efficiency of 44.5%, 14.8%, and 59.3%, respectively. The findings show that the photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) system's thermal and electrical efficiency increase when Reynolds numbers increase. The heat transfer rate of the PV/T system may increase by 15% with an increased Reynolds number. A maximum decrease in cell temperature is obtained by increasing the tube diameter and decreasing the backplate thickness of the photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) system. An increase in the tube diameters of the PV/T system results in a maximum reduction of 6 °C in cell temperature. The experiment and numerical findings were in better agreement in this study, with the highest relative error of 3.96%.