Effect of varying the thermophysical properties of phase change material on the performance of photovoltaic/thermal-PCM hybrid module numerically

Abstract

The present investigation uses ANSYS-Fluent to establish a three-dimensional computational model to examine the impact of varying thermophysical properties of phase change material on photovoltaic/thermal system performance. A merit function is employed to determine the impact of varying the PCM thermophysical properties on the system to assess the economic feasibility of a proposed PV/T-PCM setup. The findings indicate that, despite the coolant discharge temperature appearing to be somewhat greater for the PV/T-PCM layout than for the PV/T design, the average PV surface temperature seems to be lower for the PV/T-PCM module. Additionally, the coolant outlet temperature dramatically improves with elevating the PCM melting temperature and thermal conductivity. When the latent heat of PCM elevates from 80 to 240 kJ/kg, the thermal and total energy efficiencies for the PV/T-PCM structure decline from 60.8 to 49.2 % and 72.6 to 61 %, respectively. Moreover, boosting the PCM melting temperature and thermal conductivity, respectively, from 305 to 323 K and 0.1 to 0.5 W/m.K dramatically enhances the total energy efficiency by about 13 and 10 %. It is found that varying the PCM melting temperature has a significantly greater impact on the total energy efficiency of PV/T-PCM module than that for the latent heat of fusion and thermal conductivity, where the total energy efficiency marginally increases from about 47.5 to 77.75 %, when boosting the PCM melting temperature from 305 to 323 K. With increasing the melting temperature and the thermal conductivity of the PCM, the heat to electricity ratio and the merit function value are significantly enhanced for the PV/T-PCM layout.