Loading...
Optical and Thermal Enhancements of PV Solar Collectors Via Encapsulated Phase Change Material
Hamada, Ahmed T.
Hamada, Ahmed T.
Description
A Master of Science thesis in Mechanical Engineering by Ahmed Tarek Hamada entitled, “Development and performance analysis of substrates coated with metal-organic framework for gas sensing applications”, submitted in April 2023. Thesis advisor is Dr. Mehmet F. Orhan. Soft copy is available (Thesis, Completion Certificate, Approval Signatures, and AUS Archives Consent Form).
Abstract
Photovoltaic (PV) cells often suffer from a significant performance decline and reduced lifespan due to overheating. This study is the first to numerically investigate the use of nano-encapsulated phase-change material (nano-ePCM) dispersions in various photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) solar collector configurations as optical filters, heat carriers, and storage media. The nano-ePCM dispersion is composed of water-dispersed nano-ePCM particles with silica shells and paraffin-based cores. The proposed system was optically, thermally, and electrically modeled and validated against published results. The study analyzed the performance of the PV/T systems under varying conditions, including the PCM core material, flow rate, solar intensity, particle size and loading, channel depth and length, ambient temperatures, wind speeds, and inlet temperatures. The proposed PV/T configurations were compared against similar configurations in literature that employed different working fluids to verify their superiority. Furthermore, the study conducted environmental and exergoeconomic analyses to investigate the environmental and economic feasibilities of the most superior PV/T configuration. To investigate the optical filtration capabilities of the nano-ePCM dispersion, the study proposed a performance metric known as the "spectral match" (SM). Results showed that all ePCM dispersions exhibited a spectral match of over 70% when the PCM cores were in their liquid phase and a spectral match of over 30% while in solid phase. The study verified the thermal regulation capabilities of the proposed nano-ePCM dispersions during phase change on the employed PV cells. Additionally, when compared to other similar PV/T configurations from different literatures, the proposed coupled, decoupled, and partially coupled systems exhibited total exergy efficiency enhancements of 43.2%, 76.8%, and 2.6%, respectively. This study paves the way for novel PV/T collectors that employ smart, multi-functional fluids offering superior electrical and thermal performance.