Comparative study on the performance of a solar photocatalytic Trombe wall with different types of collectors: Copper/Thermoelectric/PV plate

Abstract

Solar photocatalytic Trombe wall (SPTW) is a technology that can help to improve the indoor environmental quality and simultaneously enhance solar energy utilization, which receives lots of attention recently. Nevertheless, current research predominantly emphasizes the heat and mass transfer analysis of a single envelope system, with limited exploration of energy and performance comparison of multi-physics systems. For this, flow, heat and mass transfer analysis of SPTW with four different types of collectors: SPTW with copper plate, SPTW with photovoltaic plate (PV-SPTW), SPTW with thermoelectric plate (TE-SPTW) and SPTW with hybrid PV-TE plate (PV-TE-SPTW), are theoretically proposed to reveal the energy flow distributions among these systems. Based on the coupled analysis, parameter characteristics have been conducted to investigate the effects of solar radiation intensity, system channel width and system channel height together with ambient temperature on the heating Q, purification CADR and power generation Z performance of various SPTWs. Furthermore, a comparison of the energy and exergy performance among these four systems is clarified through the energy, exergy flow and equivalent energy saving. From the obtained results, it can be indicated that the reverse flow has a strong impact on the performance of natural ventilation and further varies the indexes of Q, CADR and Z when the solar radiation intensity is inferior to a threshold value from 100 to 300 W/m2. With the changing channel height and width, the maximum Q and CADR are both appears in TE-SPTW system, respectively reaching by 4.64 MJ/h and 136.56 m3/h as the structure of 0.05 m channel width and 3.0 m channel height, which show 39.7 % and 5.9 % respectively compared to the SPTW model. Conducting energy and exergy analyses on the four systems reveal their remarkable potential, sacrificing a minimal 0.032 MJ or less in purification performance in exchange for substantial energy savings of at least 0.314 MJ. This work will establish a foundational contribution to advancing energy-efficient building technologies.