
Proceedings of ISES Solar World Congress 2007: Solar Energy and Human Settlement
936
potential is the simultaneous production of electricity and
hot water.
Although a water-based PV/T system is able to achieve a
higher overall energy output per unit collector area than the
“side-by-side” systems, for daily operation the photovoltaic
efficiency of the hybrid system still will drop considerably
towards the end of the day, when the heat removal fluid
(water) temperature in the storage tank will finally reach
the level that meets the hot-water demand requirements. If
the evaporating refrigerant of a heat pump is used as the
coolant of the PV cells, a lower operating temperature and
accordingly a higher PV efficiency can be achieved.
In the Rankine refrigeration cycle operation, the solar
energy absorbed by the refrigerant at the evaporator will be
released later on at the condenser with a higher working
temperature. S.Ito and N.Miura (1997) constructed a SAHP
system with a PV/T evaporator based on this principle
[7]
.
The experimental results indicated that the COP of the heat
pump could be as high as 6.0, when 40 ć water was
supplying to the condenser. It was also concluded that the
PV modules attached on the solar collectors did not affect
much the performance of the heat pump. However, the PV
or the overall PV/T performance in the system was not
covered in their publications.
In this study, a novel PV-SAHP system was constructed
with the PV cells laminated onto the evaporator-collector
plate. So a small portion of the solar energy received was
converted to electricity and the rest was converted as heat.
The heat energy was then absorbed by the refrigerant and
carried over to the condenser. Photovoltaic efficiency was
increased in this way due to the lowered PV cell operating
temperature as a result of the refrigerant evaporation
process. The COP of the heat pump was also substantially
improved because of the solar energy absorption. Presented
below are the working principle, the testing method and the
dynamic photovoltaic/thermal performance of our
experimental PV-SAHP unit.
2. EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP
The basic components of PV-SAHP system include: PV
evaporator, air evaporator, variable-frequency compressor,
air-cooled condenser, water-cooled condenser, electricity-
operated expansion valve. There were other accessories
such as refrigerant filter, liquid trap, four-way valve,
anti-vibration mounting and auxiliary capillary tubing. R22
was used as the refrigerant in this heat pump. The
photovoltaic system mainly consisted of PV cells, inverter,
controller, accumulator, electric appliance box, and system
load. The PV cells and the evaporating- collector plate were
laminated together to form a PV evaporator module.
Detailed configuration can be found in author’s another
paper about PV-SAHP system (Ji Jie et al., 2007)[3].
The air evaporator and PV evaporator are connected in
parallel. Normally the PV evaporator is in service. At a
time when the solar radiation is weak, and the evaporating
temperature falls below the ambient temperature, then the
air evaporator will start to operate as a booster. The
air-cooled condenser and the water-cooled condenser are
also connected in parallel. The two normally do not operate
simultaneously. When the water-cooled condenser is in
service, the circulating water can indirectly support space
heating and domestic water-heating through individual
heat-exchange devices. The air-cooled condenser on the
other hand is able to directly support space heating when it
is in use, though this part is not modeled in detail in our
present set-up. By changing the positions of the cut-off
valves and the four-way valve, the SAHP system is able to
provide multi-functional services such as space cooling,
space heating and domestic water-heating.
3. TEST METHOD AND PERFORMANCE PARA-
METERS
Frequency of compressor has important impact on system
performance, example: condensing capacity, compression
ratio, COP, phovoltaic/thermal efficiency and others. If the
compressor frequency can match well with the working
conditions as solar radiation etc, the performance of
PV-SAHP system will be done well, otherwise will be done
badly. So for optimization of PV-SAHP system,
performance study under different frequency is necessary.
Two operating modes using 40 Hz and 60 Hz frequency
were processed in the experiments. Experiments were
started at AM10:00 with the water temperature in tank 15 , ć
and stopped when the water temperature was up to 55 . ć
The mass of water in tank was 80kg.The operating