Experimental study on the tube plate PV/T system with iron filings filled

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) system – the iron filing filled tube plate PV/T system (IFTP system), for solar energy collection efficiently. In the system, the Tube plate solar collector is adopted to convert solar radiation to electricity and thermal energy simultaneously. To improve the structure of the traditional tube plate PV/T module, this paper presents a new tube plate PV/T module which filled with iron filings instead of air between the absorbing plate and fluid channel to increase the heat transfer between the fluid and photovoltaic cells. After that, an IFTP system is constructed and tested according to the related standards test under laboratory conditions. Experimental research is carried out under five groups of different radiation intensity (400–800 W/m2). The experimental results demonstrate that the temperature of IFTP module in effectively reduces by 3.5–6.5 °C, and the photoelectric efficiency increases by 19.8% compared with traditional tube plate PV/T system. The IFTP system takes a shorter period of time to achieve the same temperature difference of tanks.