Thermal performance study of an active solar building façade with specific PV/T hybrid modules

Abstract

This paper presents an active solar building façade system, which can generate domestic hot water and electric power. The design system utilizes the specific photovoltaic/thermal modules as an external skin to form an opaque ventilated façade, and the additional active layer can reduce the heat flux transferred into the building envelope and has the potential to preheat fresh air. To investigate the thermal impact of this solar façade on the building’s envelope, a number of heat transfer analysis work is done from the aspect of theoretical analysis and an experimental platform consisting of the opaque photovoltaic/thermal ventilated façade and a hot water system is set up to evaluate the net heat gain combined from the experimental research aspect. The specific photovoltaic/thermal facade in experimental system is a hybrid module composed of glass lamination, photovoltaic cells, single-sided inflatable plate collector, and ethylene-vinyl acetate. The results indicated that the coefficient of performance of designed system can reach 3.1 and average photovoltaic conversion efficiency is about 9%. The opaque ventilated PV/T façade is superior to conventional wall, which can reduce heat flux through the external envelope by 40%.