Abstract
Solar energy has been one of the accessible and affordable renewable energy technologies for the last few decades. Photovoltaics and solar thermal collectors are mature technologies to harness solar energy. However, the efficiency of photovoltaics decays at increased operating temperatures, and solar thermal collectors suffer from low exergy. Furthermore, along with several financial, structural, technical and socio-cultural barriers, the limited shadow-free space on building rooftops has significantly affected the adoption of solar energy. Thus, Photovoltaic Thermal (PVT) collectors that combine the advantages of photovoltaic cells and solar thermal collector into a single system have been developed. This study gives an extensive review of different PVT systems for residential applications, their performance indicators, progress, limitations and research opportunities. The literature review indicated that PVT systems used air, water, bi-fluids, nanofluids, refrigerants and phase-change material as the cooling medium and are sometimes integrated with heat pumps and seasonal energy storage. The overall efficiency of a PVT system reached up to 81% depending upon the system design and environmental conditions, and there is generally a trade-off between thermal and electrical efficiency. The review also highlights future research prospects in areas such as materials for PVT collector design, long-term reliability experiments, multi-objective design optimisation, techno-exergo-economics and photovoltaic recycling.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilSustainable development has been the mantra of the modern world, and the United Nations had adopted 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) [1] with emphasis on gender and social inclusion to eradicate poverty, protect the globe and promote peace and prosperity
The application of nano-fluids was summarized by Abbas et al [30] and identified the necessity to study the effect of nanofluid usage on the lifetime enhancement of Photovoltaic Thermal (PVT)
A similar conclusion about the instability of hybrid nanofluids was reported by Shah et al [33], and it was reported that there is scope for testing hybrid nanofluids in PVT systems due to their ability to escalate electrical efficiency
Summary
During 2015–2020, several researchers have tried to analyse the PVT technology by categorising the components through systematic reviews. The authors of [41] classified the concentrated PVT systems into thermally coupled and decoupled and presented a thorough review of different heat transfer components and their economics. A waste heat recovery and spectral beam splitting-based concentrated PVT systems were reviewed by Ju et al [43,44], covering studies based on research and development, theoretical and experimental analysis, feasibility analysis and conceptual designs. The authors suggested that PCMs relevant for PVT applications must be developed for the enhancement of heat transfer Thermal absorbers and their fixing methods to PVT are significant for facilitating maximum heat transfer, and Wu et al [38] presented a detailed review and described that the EVA-based lamination method was found to be the best for integration.
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