The Water Based Photovoltaic Thermal Fiberglass Collector: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

It has previously been demonstrated that increasing the surface temperature of solar panels causes a decrease in output power and efficiency.As a result, in addition to the cooling method, many other collector designs have been widely developed to improve the cooling rate and heat transfer in between photovoltaic module and the working fluid.  In this study, a fiberglass collector design was introduced and evaluated in a laboratory environment with different solar radiations and water has been selected as the working fluid, the flow rate will be adjusted during the experiment from 1.4 to 3 l/min. The collector's electrical and thermal performance will be investigated at solar radiation levels ranging from 450 to 850 W/m². Experiments revealed that the design of this fiberglass collector is capable of increasing the output power from 40.26W to 47.456W, while achieving a thermal efficiency of 72.98% and a temperature reduction rate of 35.36 %  (73.31^oC to 54.2^oC) at 850 W/m². However, at 650 W/m2 solar radiation, the highest electrical efficiency was recorded with a 9.7% and 20.74 %  increase in output power rate. Aside from the demonstrated ability of the cooling method for improving the performance of PVT collectors, this collector is also simple to fabricate and inexpensive to manufacture.