Numerical investigation of the effect of fin height on the performance of a building-integrated photovoltaic-phase change material unit and application of soft computing method to predict the optimal system performance

Abstract

A numerical study is done to analyze the effect of fin length on the performance of a building-integrated photovoltaic-phase change material (PV/PCM) unit. The results obtained for cases with different fin lengths (1, 2, 3 and 4 cm) are compared with the findings related to the finless case. The required simulations are conducted by using computational fluid dynamics technique and with the help of Ansys Fluent software. Validation of the numerical method is done through comparison with the experimental data available in the literature. It was found that with the increase in the length of the fins, the performance of the system first improves and then weakens, but the performance of the PV/PCM unit is always better than the finless unit. It was found that the optimal fin length is equal to 3 cm. Furthermore, the artificial neural network technique was used to develop a relationship for predicting the temporal changes of the PV panel efficiency of the finned PV/PCM unit. The correlation coefficient of the model was reported as 0.9906, which confirmed the acceptable accuracy of the model.