Modeling of a hybrid thermal photovoltaic (PVT) collector based on thin film organic solar cells

Abstract

The new trend is towards limiting the amount of silicon used in PVT collectors, by favoring new thin film technologies (other than that of Si). The most common technologies today are based on (CdTe), (CIS), (CIGS) and (CIGSS) which have high electrical efficiencies of around 20.5%. However, these technologies have certain drawbacks: less advanced industrialization, limited raw materials and in competition with other uses, toxicity of materials (in particular CdTe) which makes recycling more complex but at a high cost. New concepts of PVT collectors have therefore been explored for twenty years based on the use of organic materials such as the polymer (P3HT:PCBM). In this paper, we studied a three-dimensional modeling of a hybrid thermal photovoltaic (PVT) collector based on (P3HT:PCBM) by the Comsol 5.4 software and matlab. The results show that The temperature of the PVT collector reach a maximum value of the 110.09°C, the fluid flow velocity reach a value of 2.75*10−3 m/sec, higher thermal efficiency (85.77%) and lower electrical efficiency (6.57%) compared to the PVT collector based on monocrystalline silicon.