Investigation on a Photovoltaic Thermoelectric Ventilator

A novel photovoltaic thermoelectric ventilator (PV-TEV) was proposed and investigated in this paper. In PV-TEV system, the outdoor fresh air is firstly heated up by PV airflow channel, and then heated up further when it flows through the hot side heat sink of thermoelectric ventilator into the indoor room. At the same time, the exhaust air cooled down the heat sink on the other side of the TEM when it is pumped out of the indoor environment. The electricity power of PV array is storage in battery, which can used to power the thermoelectric ventilator through voltage controller. The PV-TFAV system model was set up to calculate system performance with the actual solar radiation intensity and environment condition. The results show that the COPs and the fresh air temperature supplied for indoor is increased as the solar radiation intensify increase. The COPs are between 2.90 and 3.35 and the fresh air temperature is between 18.3 °C and 31 °C. This simply and environmentally friendly system is promising and worthwhile being applied to for low carbon buildings fresh air supply.