Experiment Research on Thermal Characteristic of the PV-T Aerator

A novel PV-T (photovoltaic/thermal) aerator was presented and the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation was taken to compare two kinds structure of device, that air flow from bottom inlet or beside inlet. Simulation results show that bottom inlet can decrease the inner temperature of PV-T device and make the temperature well-distributed in PV surface. A steady state experiment was taken in room for the PV-T aerator. Thermal characteristic about the PV-T aerator was analyzed under different heating power, different air flow rate and different number of hole in the bottom cover. The indoor experiment results show that with the increasing of heat power, the inlet and outlets' wind temperature of steady-state is rising, the useful power increases; meanwhile, the heat loss is rising. The air heating efficiency of the device is decreasing with the increase of heating power. The temperature distribution in the PV-T aerator becomes uniform when the number of hole decreases. The results in experiments at different air flow rates show that air heating efficiency increase with the air flow rate increase. Outdoor experiment was completed under the real sky. It shows that the variation tendency of heating power close to the solar irradiance, the heating power of whole device has the highest utilization rate at noon.