Annual exergy evaluation on photovoltaic-thermal hybrid collector

Abstract In this study, we designed and constructed a photovoltaic-thermal hybrid collector on our campus. The collector consisted of a liquid heating flat-plate solar collector with mono-Si PV cells on substrate of non-selective aluminum absorber plate, The collector area was 1.3 × 0.5 m [1]. Since electrical and thermal energy are different in nature, it is necessary to take into account the nature of the energy in evaluating or comparing them. For this, we adopted concepts based on the exergy theory. From our annual experimental evaluation based on exergy, we are concluding that the PV/T collector can produce higher output density than a unit PV module or liquid heating flat-plate solar collector.