An investigation on energy performance assessment of a photovoltaic solar wall under buoyancy-induced and fan-assisted ventilation system

•Novel testing of a PV solar wall with ventilation through an outdoor test-room.•Energy performance comparison under buoyancy-induced and fan-assisted ventilation.•A simplified energy performance model of a PV solar wall and its validation.

The aim of this paper is to present an investigation on energy performance assessment of a photovoltaic solar wall with an operation of either buoyancy-induced or fan-assisted ventilation system. The vertical photovoltaic solar wall was installed on façade of a prefabricated outdoor test-room located at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. The experimental apparatus of the photovoltaic solar wall was a built construction with two commercially available photovoltaic modules, an air cavity and an insulated back layer. The selected operating conditions for the ventilated PV facade were utilized for establishing their electrical and thermal characteristics. Measurements of electric power, outlet air velocities, temperatures, solar intensities and thermal time constant were obtained from the experiments. The maximum combined electrical plus thermal efficiencies obtained after analysis of the presented measurement data were 31.4% and 37.6% for buoyancy-induced and fan-assisted based air ventilation respectively. The energy balance performed for buoyancy-induced and fan-assisted ventilation demonstrated that operation of fan-assisted ventilation achieved better performance, due to considerable gain in enthalpy of air by convection heat loss. A simplified energy performance model is proposed and validated. The agreement between predictions of the proposed energy performance model and measurement results is presented to be very good.