Long Term Performance Assessment of a Residential PV/Thermal Hybrid System

The application of residential rooftop PV systems increased significantly in the last 10 years in many countries and became a major source of clean energy in dwellings besides traditional solar hot water technology. To optimise the performance of these green energy systems, the incorporation of PV/thermal hybrid systems is a future option for sustainable residential building designs. In this work, a novel design of PV/Thermal (PVT) hybrid panels, using heat pipe technology, is proposed with the aim of fulfilling the hot water and electricity demand of a house in Sydney. The heat pipe system is integrated into a traditional PV panel to transfer the heat stored within the PV panel material to a header that is connected to the household hot water cycle. A preliminary analysis of the test results for the proposed PVT system design under different weather conditions in Sydney is conducted, where the transient variation of the output water temperature as well as power production is investigated. The results show that the hot water temperature at the header outlet reaches around a maximum of 50 °C on a typical summer day and a minimum of 30 °C on a typical winter day. The daily heat delivered to the hot water tank is found to be in the range of 3.7–5.2 MJ per m2 of the PVT panel surface area. The results show that the energy efficiency of the adopted PVT panel design could reach more than 4 times higher than the traditional PV panel.