Recent advances in flat plate photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar collectors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2010.09.024Get rights and content

Abstract

Flat plate photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar collector produces both thermal energy and electricity simultaneously. This paper presents the state-of-the-art on flat plate PV/T collector classification, design and performance evaluation of water, air and combination of water and/or air based. This review also covers the future development of flat plate PV/T solar collector on building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) and building integrated photovoltaic/thermal (BIPVT) applications. Different designs feature and performance of flat plate PV/T solar collectors have been compared and discussed. Future research and development (R&D) works have been elaborated. The tube and sheet design is the simplest and easiest to be manufactured, even though, the efficiency is 2% lower compared to other types of collectors such as, channel, free flow and two-absorber. It is clear from the review that for both air and water based PV/T solar collectors, the important key factors that influenced the efficiency of the system are the area where the collector covered, the number of passes and the gap between the absorber collector and solar cells. From the literature review, it is obvious that the flat plate PV/T solar collector is an alternative promising system for low-energy applications in residential, industrial and commercial buildings. Other possible areas for the future works of BIPVT are also mentioned.

Section snippets

Introduction – technology overview

Many researches towards the solar energy occur all over the world due to the concern of global crisis on oil and gas prices. According to Deffeyes [1] and later, Bardi [2], oil has already started to peak. Sadorsky [3] mentioned that oil prices are often indicative of inflationary pressure in the economy which in turn could indicate the future of interest rates and investments, gas and coal reserves, in the other hand are larger than oil, it will latter tend to be progressively replaced by the

PV/T water collector

The problems such as low PV efficiency, architectural uniformity and limited space on roof for the installation of separate system have become important factors that influenced the idea of combining the PV/T system into one complete system. Bazilian et al. [19] mentioned that, one of the major disadvantages of PV cell, beside the high cost, is the problem with low efficiency. The typical commercial PV cells are only converting between 6 and 8% of the incident radiation into electrical energy

BIPV and BIPVT

Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems are designed not only to generate electricity but also generate heat. The heat is considered to be a waste to the system and also reduces the efficiency of generation. Crawford et al. [67] have combined a heat recovery unit and analyzed it with two types of photovoltaic cell. The first system comprised of two c: Si 75 W with PV modules made of aluminium frames and fixed to the timber rafters. The second system was identical to the first system with

Conclusions

This paper has been presented with the comprehensive review on the description on design configurations of flat plate PV/T collector systems. This paper also convoluted the principle classifications of flat plate PVT collector systems. This classification provides clearly how this flat plate PV/T collector system designed can be grouped systematically according on the type of working fluid used such as water or air. Moreover, the flat plate PV/T collector system can be further distinguished

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Malaysia for sponsoring the work under project Science fund 03-01-02-SF0039. We also would like to thank the referees and the editor for their helpful comments.

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