Performance Investigations of Hybrid Solar Photovoltaic - Thermoelectric (Hybrid PV-Te) System

The performance of the solar cell is strongly depends on it’s operating temperature. The high operating temperature of the solar cell causes the thermal agitation and in turns the loss of free carriers in the crystalline PV modules. The electrical conversion efficiency and the power output of the solar cell decreases with an increase in the working temperature. Exhaustive work based on the performance improvement of PV modules using various cooling methods is reported in many literatures so far. In the present work, an experimental work to harvest the heat from solar PV module and to use it in the thermo-electric converter is described. In the designed system, the series connected solar cells are mounted on an aluminum base and Bi-Te thermoelectric modules are attached to the dark side of the base. The aluminum base creates the hot junction for the thermo-electric (TE) modules and the cold junction is achieved by circulating water. The temperature of PV cell reduces as the heat is transferred from the PV module to the circulating water via TE modules. This also creates the temperature difference across the junctions of the thermo-electric modules to generate additional electrical output. In this study, the performance of solar photovoltaic cells, PV – TE hybrid system is studied. The net efficiency of the system was found to be around 23%. The constructional details and the performance analysis are presented in this article.