Investigating the Potential of Wind as a Recovery Improvement of Building Integrated Photovoltaic’s Tiled Roof Using Indoor Solar Simulator

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) cells when integrated within a building façade, offers the possibility of generating power and heating/cooling onsite. However, PV will exhibit long-term degradation if the temperature exceeds a certain limit. In order to improve PV power and system efficiency and avoid structural deformities, it is necessary to keep PV cell temperature and cell reflection as low as possible. This study investigates the effects of wind flow on thermal and electrical performances of PV roof tiles using large scale indoor solar simulator. The study found that electrical performance improves from about 9 - 9.3% while thermal performance improves greatly from about 68 - 83% and it took only 1/5th of the time for the attainment of steady state tempera- tures when the ‘without wind flow’ was compared ‘with wind flow’ per- formance. Considering all experimental sources of error, the performance values attained agrees with the range of efficiency values reported in text books for photovoltaic roof tiles. Therefore, wind flow improves the thermal and electrical efficiency of PV roof tiles and could serve as a recovery im- provement