Effect of thermoelectric materials in electrical and thermal performance of photovoltaic thermal (PVT) collector

Abstract

A photovoltaic integrated thermal (PVT) collector with thermoelectric material has been proposed in this communication, where a channel or duct has been used below the photovoltaic module in which air has been circulated to extract the heat taken by the photovoltaic module. Hence in PVT system, electrical energy from photovoltaic and thermal energy from duct are taken at the output. In this collector, thermoelectric (TE) is used to change the thermal energy by removing the waste heat of photovoltaic module into electric energy. In proposed PVT with thermoelectric system, TEs are generally appended at the back of the photovoltaic to improve the efficiency of PVT collectors. Thermal modelling has been presented for PVT collector with thermoelectric. The effect of thermoelectric material has been analysed for PVT collector. The electrical energy gain for photovoltaic collector and overall electrical energy gain with thermoelectric has been theoretically calculated. From the computed results, the overall electrical output is observed of PVT system with thermoelectric material; it is higher than only PVT system due to thermoelectric. As PVT system without thermoelectric generates only electrical energy due to PV and thermal energy but PVT system with thermoelectric generates electrical energy due to PV and thermoelectric both as well as thermal energy so overall exergy of PVT system with thermoelectric is higher than only PVT system. Hence PVT system with thermoelectric shows better results than only PVT system in respect of electrical, thermal and overall exergy gain.