Absorber designs effect on the performance of PV/T water hybrid collector

The (PV/T) photovoltaic–thermal collector offers an attractive option because it allows the simultaneous conversion of solar energy into both electricity and heat. The design of the absorber, which is integrated under the PV module, is crucial to get a good thermal performance of the PV/T solar thermal collector. This phenomenon is related to the heat transfer from the PV modules to the coolant. The heat removal factor FR, is one of the key parameters used to identify the thermal efficiency of PV/T. A high FR depending on the absorber design means higher thermal efficiency of the collector. In this paper, the study was focused on two PV/T water collectors characterized by different absorber designs: a sheet-and-tubes absorber and an enclosure absorber. Simulations were performed to determine the best absorber design that gives the highest efficiency. Based on these simulations, it has been found that the sheet-and-tubes absorber proved to be the best design with the highest thermal efficiency of 55% with a heat removal factor of 0.68. The effect of two important parameters related to the tubes, which are tubes spacing and hydraulic diameter is also determined for PV/T with sheet-and-tubes. The result shows that the optimal thermal performance was obtained for 0.045 m of tube spacing and 0.07 m of hydraulic diameter.