A numerical study on the effect of employing porous medium on thermal performance of a PV/T system

Abstract

Surface temperatures of photovoltaic (PV) panels increase with solar radiation and ambient temperature. This temperature increase negatively affects the PV cell, causing the electrical efficiency of the system to decrease. Photovoltaic-thermal (PV/T) systems also provide thermal energy gain by cooling PV cells, increasing electrical conversion efficiency and lifespan. Integrating porous material into cooling pipes offers an important innovation in terms of the cooling techniques of PV panels. This study emphasizes the positive effects of porous materials by innovative approaches in this field. For this reason, in order to increase the electrical and thermal efficiency of PV cells, a porous material-supported cooling system was designed for the PV/T system and the effects of using porous materials with different properties were examined with Ansys Fluent software. As the porous density and porosity ratio of the porous material used throughout the pipe decreased, the average cell temperature decreased and the water outlet temperature increased. At a low flow rate of 0.3 L/min, it achieved an improvement of approximately 118% in thermal efficiency compared to the pipe without porous material. The porous structure containing 0.9 and 30 PPI pore density reached the highest efficiency value of 96.56% with a flow rate of 1.71 L/min.