The Water Based Photovoltaic Thermal Fiberglass Collector: An Experimental Investigation

The increase in ambient and surface temperatures is one of the main factors that lead to the decrease in the output power and efficiency of photovoltaic panels. A thermal photovoltaic collector (PVT) system is a method introduced to overcome the problem of excess heat on photovoltaic panels. As a result, in addition to the cooling method, many other collector designs have been widely developed to improve the cooling rate and heat transfer between the photovoltaic module and the working fluid. The purpose of this study was to introduce and evaluate a fiberglass collector design in a laboratory environment withvarying solar radiations, using water as the working fluid. The thermal and electrical performances of the PVT collector were determined under solar simulator radiation between 450 -850 W/m2. Experiments were conducted at each solar simulator with flow rate adjustment between 1.4–3 l/min. Electrical properties such as voltage, current, output power, efficiency, and thermal efficiency will be evaluated throughout the experiment. Experiments revealed that the design of this fiberglasscollector is capable of increasing the output power and achieving the highest thermal efficiency of 72.98%, a temperature reduction rate of 35.36%, with a flow rate of 3l/min at 850 W/m2. This fiberglasscollector produces a total efficiency equivalent of 82.68%, an electrical efficiency of 9.7%, and thermal efficiency of 72.98%. Aside from the demonstrated ability of the cooling method for improving the performance of PVT collectors, this collector is also simple to fabricate and inexpensive to manufacture.