Renewable Energy Resources and Technologies
Aloys Martial Ekoe A. Akata
Abstract
Photovoltaic energy has the potential to become one of the major energy sources used in the households in the tropical region of Africa, where the solar radiation intensity is abundant and almost constant over the year. Solar photovoltaic systems present many advantages when they are integrated in the ...
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Photovoltaic energy has the potential to become one of the major energy sources used in the households in the tropical region of Africa, where the solar radiation intensity is abundant and almost constant over the year. Solar photovoltaic systems present many advantages when they are integrated in the building structure envelope and have a significant influence on the indoor air temperature of dwelling buildings due to the thermal resistance modification. In this paper, a simplified model of the photovoltaic system integrated on the roof of a residential building according to the building construction customs and materials has been designed and modeled. The heat transfer is studied in several situations: with and without a Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) system and for a building with and without false ceiling. The BIPV system installed over an effective area of 35 m2 increases the building indoor air temperature of approximately 5 °C which is corrected by the heat insulation optimization of the false ceiling made up with building local materials. The final indoor air temperature obtained is in good agreement with the ASHRAE standards and can, therefore, be applied to tropical regions.
Mohammad Ameri; Omid Farhangian Marandi; Behrooz Adelshahian
Abstract
In this manuscript, a solar cavity packed with thermoelectric generator modules is investigated numerically. The hot plate of TEG modules make the inner surface of the cube, and the cold plate is outside of the cavity, under natural convection. The TEG modules are electrically in series. ...
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In this manuscript, a solar cavity packed with thermoelectric generator modules is investigated numerically. The hot plate of TEG modules make the inner surface of the cube, and the cold plate is outside of the cavity, under natural convection. The TEG modules are electrically in series. The solution algorithm using the equations of heat transfer and generated power of TEG modules is developed via MATLAB and simulated under various non-concentrated irradiation levels. The generated power variation in solar thermoelectric cavity shows that as the solar irradiance rises, the generated power increases at a growing rate. The radiation varies from 700 to 1200 W/m2, and the generated power increases from 0.2 mW to 10 mW for side TEGs and up to 30 mW for bottom side TEGs. Studying the effect of aperture size shows that, although the generated power of fully open cavity is 2.25 times higher than generated power in 5×5 cm2 aperture size cavity but its efficiency is 50% lower than small aperture cavity. Heat transfer analysis of cavity depicts the 91% of heat transferred by conduction in cube surfaces and, only 6% and 3% of input energy are lost by re-radiation and convection through the aperture, respectively.
