Indoor Room Air Conditioning Using Heat Removal from PV Panels

The paper describes the characteristics of a novel hybrid system of air conditioning and PV panel used to remove heat from PV panels located on the building roof and to air conditioning the space of the building placed just below. The design of the system is based on the well- known Trombe wall principle with the special characteristic of using a PV panel as front surface “to collect” heat that is transferred to the air chamber. A theoretical simulation has been developed to predict thermal behavior and temperatures of the air chamber and indoor room showing an excellent agreement to experimental results, within a 96.5% accuracy. Carried out tests have proved that forced convection at the air chamber can remove the energy excess at the PV panel, which can be used to increase temperature at the indoor room fulfilling comfort conditions. Top to bottom thermal gradient inside the indoor room is reduced from 5o C to 1o C when using forced convection at the air chamber which improves comfort conditions and maintains temperature within the comfort setup range.