Experimental Study on the Performance of CO2-Based Photovoltaic-Thermal Hybrid System

The electric energy generation from photovoltaic solar panel is much influenced by the temperature of photovoltaic solar panel. It is the fact that the efficiency decreases when the temperature of photovoltaic solar panel becomes higher. To prevent the efficiency drop and to combine the thermal energy usage, CO2-based photovoltaic-thermal hybrid system (abbreviated as CO2 hybrid collector) has been investigated. In the present study, a newly designed CO2 hybrid collector is introduced and evaluated as a sub-system integrated into the supercritical CO2 solar Rankine cycle system for increasing the overall system performance and to strengthen the sustainability in electric and heat generation of the system. The basic performance of the CO2 hybrid collector is experimentally verified and reported by the manner for examining a reference CO2 inlet temperature condition to the hybrid collector. The results show that the effectiveness gives advantage for 2 % higher efficiency in electric power generation compared with ordinary photovoltaic solar panel in a reference winter condition.