Solar to hydrogen: Compact and cost effective CPV field for rooftop operation and hydrogen production

Current commercial CPV systems are designed as large units which are targeted to be installed in open desert fields with high DNI availability. It appeared that the CPV is among some of those technologies which gained very little attention of people, with less customers and market. For conventional PV systems, the installations at the rooftop of commercial and residential buildings have a significant share in the total installed capacity of PV systems. That is why for most of the countries, the PV installations at the rooftop of commercial and residential buildings are aimed to be increased to half of total installed PV. On the other hand, there is no commercial CPV system available to be suitable for rooftop operation, giving motivation for the development of CPV field of compact systems. This paper discusses the development of a CPV field for the rooftop operation, comprising of compact CPV system with cost effective but highly accurate solar tracking sensor and wireless master slave control. In addition, the performance of the developed CPV systems is evaluated for production of hydrogen, which can be used as energy carrier or energy storage and a maximum solar to hydrogen efficiency of 18% is obtained. However, due to dynamic nature of the weather data and throughout the day variations in the performance of CPV and electrolyser, the solar to hydrogen performance is proposed to be reported as daily and long term average efficiency. The CPV-Hydrogen system showed daily average conversion efficiency of 15%, with solar to hydrogen production rate of 218kWh/kg.

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