Photovoltaic glazing: analysis of thermal behavior and indoor comfort

The integration of photovoltaic systems into buildings is one of the best ways to exploit effectively solar energy and to realize the distributed generation inside urban and suburban environmental. BIPV can be installed in a wide variety of applications such as skylights, roofing, walls and windows but, glazing is perhaps the most promising application. In this context the development of products with the best compromise between electrical efficiency and control of transparency will see the most competition between competing companies and those that win this battle will inevitably come to be successful in the market. Most BIPV glass today uses crystalline silicon absorber layers which are inherently opaque, whereas better transparency could be achieved at a reasonable level of efficiency using other absorber layers such as very thin layers of CIGS or dye sensitive cells. Specifically in this research the thermal behavior of a BIPV glass product using c-Si by means of one-layer model is performed. The PV module temperature is then used to evaluate the thermal radiant field in a sample room. An application to a typical thermal comfort computation is finally presented.