Study of synergy between photovoltaic, thermoelectric and direct evaporative cooling system for improved performance

Abstract

In case of photovoltaic (PV) most of the solar energy gets dissipated in the form of heat into the PV module. In the current context, efforts are made to improve the efficiency by utilizing this dissipated heat. One of the ways is to use low temperature thermoelectric (TE), based on the Seebeck effect, along with the PV cell. The mathematical model studied for performance evaluation, using ANSYS software, was based on cascaded hybrid Photovoltaic-Thermoelectric-Direct Evaporative Cooling System (PV-TE-EC) combinations, i.e. PV-EC (without TE), PV-TE-EC, PV-2TE-EC (two cascaded layers of TE sandwiched between PV and EC) and PV-3TE-EC (module with three cascaded TE layers) modules. Also, the effect of solar concentration ratio, temperature coefficient and wind speed was investigated. At concentration ratio 7, the resultant efficiencies of PV-TE-EC, PV-2TE-EC and PV-3TE-EC were higher than PV (15.71%) by 2.15, 4.87 and 6.54% respectively. It has been proposed that this efficiency can be further increased by using low temperature coefficient PV (0.34–0.38%/⁰C), radiation focusing unit with concentration ratio 3 to 7 and keeping the complete PV-3TE-EC setup at the lower wind speed location (≤1 m/s). This combination of parameters will allow the PV-3TE-EC hybrid system to demonstrate nearly constant efficiency throughout the day.