Experimental and numerical analysis of a grooved hybrid photovoltaic-thermal solar drying system

Abstract

• CFD analysis of grooved plate, spherical turbulators and baffles in a PVT collector. • Testing of the developed PVT collector in a drying application at two flow rates. • Overall exergy efficiency of PVT system was found in the range of 10.65-11.17%. • Exergy efficiency of drying chamber was attained between the range of 59.16-68.31%. Photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) systems are sustainable applications that allows to produce thermal and electrical energies simultaneously. In this work, a sustainable solar drying system that contains a modified PVT-air collector has been designed, numerically analyzed, manufactured and tested. In the first step of this study, four different PVT collector configurations have been numerically analyzed in order to develop a new hybrid PVT drying system. According to the numerically obtained results, outlet temperature of the PVT collector with grooved absorber, spherical turbulators and baffle configurations was higher than the outlet temperature of the unmodified collector as 15.77%. This promising PVT collector was then fabricated and integrated with a drying chamber. The manufactured hybrid drying system has been tested under various air flow rates. The experimental findings illustrated that the average thermal efficiency and overall exergy efficiency of the PVT collector varied between 61.32-77.49% and 10.65-11.17%, respectively. In addition, mean exergy efficiency of the drying chamber was found in the range of 59.16-68.31%. Average sustainability index values of the collector and the drying chamber was obtained between the ranges of 1.12-1.14 and 3.74-5.82, respectively. Moreover, payback period of the dryer varied between 2.98-3.51 years according to the economic analysis.