Experimental investigation of tri-functional photovoltaic/thermal solar collector

• A design of tri-functional photovoltaic/thermal solar collector is proposed.
• The performance of tri-functional PV/T collector is investigated and compared.
• The tri-functional PV/T collector is flexible to different working modes and variable seasons.

Photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar collectors can provide electric power and thermal energy simultaneously. Either PV/T water collectors or PV/T air collectors can be left unused in some seasons because of the freezing problem of water and seasonal demand of hot air. In this paper, a novel design of tri-functional PV/T solar collector was proposed. The collector can work in PV/water-heating mode or PV/air-heating mode according to the seasonal requirements. Experiments were conducted in different working modes under variable conditions to evaluate the performance of collector. The results show that the daily thermal efficiency achieved 46.0% with the electrical efficiency of 10.2% in PV/air-heating mode. The temperature increase of air reached 20 °C with the flow rate of 0.033 kg/s on a sunny day. The instantaneously thermal efficiency at zero reduced temperature were 37.4% and 44.3% as the air flow rate was 0.026 kg/s and 0.032 kg/s respectively. In PV/water-heating mode, the thermal efficiency of the collector was 56.6% at zero reduced temperature, and the daily thermal efficiency of the system was around 36.0%. Compared with solar collectors presented by other authors, the tri-functional PV/T collector is able to operate efficiently in various conditions.