Abstract
ABSTRACT Understanding of cell temperature of Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) is essential in the calculation of their conversion efficiency, durability and installation costs. Current PV cell temperature models mainly fail to provide accurate predictions in complex arrangement of BIPVs under various climatic conditions. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a new regression model for prediction of the BIPV cell temperature in various climates and design conditions, including the effects of relative PV position to the roof edge, solar radiation intensity, wind speed, and wind direction. To represent the large number of possible climatic and design scenarios, the advanced technique of Latin Hypercube Sampling was firstly utilized to reduce the number of investigated scenarios from 13,338 to 374. Then, a high-resolution validated full-scale 3-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) microclimate model was developed for modelling of BIPV’s cell temperature, and then was applied to model all the reduced scenarios. A nonlinear multivariable regression model was afterward fit to this population of 374 sets of CFD simulations. Eventually, the developed regression model was evaluated with new sets of unused climatic and design data when a high agreement with a mean discrepancy of 3% between the predicted and simulated BIPV cell temperatures was observed.
Highlights
The share of renewable energy has increased in the world primary consumptions from14% of global demands in 1998 to 19.3 % in 2015 (Goldemberg, 2000; Renewable EnergyPolicy Network for the 21st Century [REN21], 2017)
It is noteworthy that the increase of the critical interval contributes to the reduction of strip amount for each variable in the specific range and further leads to a smaller population size for the simulations
A new regression model for prediction of the building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) cell temperature was proposed from a series of full-scaled BIPV Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations
Summary
The share of renewable energy has increased in the world primary consumptions from14% of global demands in 1998 to 19.3 % in 2015 (Goldemberg, 2000; Renewable EnergyPolicy Network for the 21st Century [REN21], 2017). It is expected that renewable energy share takes one quarter of the whole energy market by 2040 with an average annual increase rate of 2.8% (Energy Information Administration [EIA], 2017) with a potential to be expanded over a long-term period of time (up to 30-80% by 2100 according to Panwar, Kaushik, and Kothari (2011)). The high temperature degrades the PV materials and shorten their durability, which is expected as 30-35 years for such integrated systems (Bahaj, 2003). This implies that the PV cell temperature should be controlled either with advanced mechanical cooling approaches or alternatively with natural ventilation, in hot climate where there is a high risk of 48 hot spot formations
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