Performance enhancement of photovoltaic/thermal system using dimpled channel subjected to forced convection

To alleviate the energy and environmental problems caused by traditional energy consumption, the evolution of green energy such as solar energy has been recently encouraged by policymakers. For better extraction of available solar energy, a hybrid system, termed a photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) system, has been developed owing to its effectiveness in the performance enhancement of photovoltaic (PV) cells. In this work, a novel PV/T system containing a dimpled teardrop plate was proposed, which can significantly reduce the temperature and enhance the efficiency of PV cells due to the enhanced heat transfer of the dimpled teardrop structures distributed regularly on the plate. As a result, the steady temperature of the PV cell under 95 mW·cm-2 irradiance was reduced from 67.0 to 32.8 °C and the corresponding maximum power was improved from 209.66 to 232.60 mW when Reynolds number (Re) is 4268, showing a significantly high-power enhancement of 13.79 %. Meanwhile, the efficiency enhancement of the PV/T system with a dimpled teardrop plate is better than that with a flat plate, which proves the effectiveness of dimpled teardrop structures. Furthermore, the influence of Re on the heat transfer performance of the PV/T system is also systematically analysed. A numerical simulation has also been carried out, which provides a detailed flow analysis through dimpled and flat PV/T systems. This work is helpful in the promotion of PV/T technology in PV power stations.