Performance Enhancement of a Concentrated Photovoltaic-Thermal System Integrated with Active Thermoelectric Cooling: A Comparative Experimental Study
نویسندگان
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Jiroft, Jiroft, Iran
3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Higher Education Complex of Bam, Bam, Iran
4 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran
doi
10.5829/ije.2026.39.12c.13چکیده
Concentrated photovoltaic/thermal (CPV/T) systems face a critical challenge: thermal degradation that reduces electrical output. This paper introduces and experimentally validates a novel hybrid thermal management strategy that integrates a CPV/T collector with thermoelectric coolers paired with finned heat sinks (TEC/FHSs). This setup enables active cooling to maintain low PV cell temperatures, thereby boosting electrical output, while simultaneously recovering residual heat via forced convection for thermal energy utilization. A comparative analysis was performed using First Law (energy) and Second Law (exergy) metrics across operations with and without the TEC/FHSs. The active cooling strategy proved highly effective: the CPV/T with TEC/FHSs system successfully reduced the PV cell temperature by up to 6 °C at peak intensity. Quantitatively, this mitigation led to a daily electrical efficiency of 10.8%, marking an improvement of 30.8% over the mode without TEC/FHSs. Although the daily thermal efficiency was marginally lower with TEC/FHSs (e.g., 20.67% vs. 25%), the system still showed a 27.3% improvement in overall exergy efficiency. This conclusive finding confirms that the thermodynamic quality gained from the enhanced electrical output successfully offsets the TEC/FHSs’ power consumption and the slight thermal losses. Therefore, integrating TEC/FHSs is an effective and thermodynamically advantageous solution for thermal management in CPV/Ts.
