| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1509552 | Energy Procedia | 2015 | 13 Pages |
Thermal photovoltaic (PV/T) water based collectors are used to convert solar radiation to both thermal energy and electricity simultaneously. Along with energy analysis, exergy analysis is also useful for thermal systems such as PV/T to evaluate the “quality” of energy obtained from the system. Various types of PV/T collectors are available on the market. However, in this paper, a commercialized PV/T system is selected and exergy and economic analysis (exergoeconomics) is performed for a specific collector using known technical parameters and price for three cities in Iran with different insolation level. A MATLAB simulation program is prepared for this purpose, and it is cross validated using a former study on the same collector performed by TRNSYS and good agreement is observed. According to the results, exergy efficiency is obtained to be 9.7%, 9.6%, and 9.6% for the cities of Tabriz, Shiraz, and Esfahan respectively. An economic analysis is also performed using Net Present Value (NPV) method for the mentioned cities, and it concluded that with the specified economic parameters, the system is marginally economically feasible. This is found to be due to high capital investment costs as well as cheap available fossil fuel that is utilized widely in order to supply thermal and electrical energy demand in the studied cities.
