Thermal management enhancement of building-integrated photovoltaic systems using coupled heat pipe and evaporative porous clay cooler

The building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) panel systems often lead to a notable decline in PV panels efficiency and lifetime due to their temperature rise because of inadequate cooling. This study investigates the performance of innovative cooling strategy of using a coupled heat pipes and porous clay cooler and compare it with other related three BIPV cooling systems configurations including a conventional BIPV cooling with and without air gap and a pure evaporative porous clay cooling. The aim is to improve the PV panel cooling, ultimately reduce the PV temperature and enhance the overall performance of the BIPV system as well as reducing the building indoor temperature and boosting energy efficiency within the building. The system model, comprising sets of transient equations for the different system configurations, was solved using MATLAB and confirmed with previous experimental findings. The results indicate that comparing with the traditional BIPV system, using BIPV/Clay cooling systems and the hybrid BIPV/Clay-heat pipe cooling systems achieved peak PV temperature reductions of up to 14 °C and 14.7 °C, respectively. Additionally, these cooling methods led to a maximum interior room temperature reduction of approximately 14 °C and an average decrease of 8 °C. Moreover, the hybrid BIPV/Clay-heat pipe cooling system demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional BIPV system, achieving the highest improvements in PV electrical efficiency, output power, and exergy efficiency, with gains of 7.8 %, 6.4 %, and 8.4 %, respectively. Further, when the hybrid BIPV/Clay-heat pipe cooling system was employed, the clay cooling efficiency and clay exergy efficiency values improved on average by 30.2 % and 29.7 %, respectively, compared to the BIPV/Clay cooling system in addition to the increase of the lifetime of the PV panels due to isolating it from the contact with the water/water vapor of the clay cooling system. However, this hybrid approach resulted in a rise in electricity production costs from 0.077 $/kWh to roughly 0.138 $/kWh and extended the payback time from 7.38 years to 13.6 years. But, despite its initial economic drawbacks, the hybrid BIPV/Clay-HP cooling system demonstrates considerable effectiveness and long lifetime compared to other cooling configurations.