A thermal performance study for different glazed water based photovoltaic thermal collectors

A photovoltaic thermal collector (PVT) is a hybrid technology. It is used to simultaneously produce heat and electricity. The current improvements in PV/T are to increase the thermal efficiency. Many PVT system parameters such as thermal conductivity, type of absorber, type of solar panels and operating conditions are important factors that control the PVT performance. In this paper, the PVT performance for the improved parallel flow was tested and compared with the conventional direct flow absorber in terms of the thermal efficiency, for different mass flow rates ranging from 0.03 to 0.06 kg/s, different solar radiation varying from 400 to 850 W/m². It was found that the improved absorber design achieves better thermal efficiency as compared to the direct flow design for the same operating conditions. The maximum thermal efficiency is 57.27%, for the improved parallel flow, as compared to 54.26% for the direct flow design.