EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF PHOTOVOLTAIC THERMAL HEAT EXCHANGER- Review

Mechanical Engineering

Solar energy is clean and is abundantly available. Solar technologies use the sun to provide heat, light, electricity, etc for domestic and industrial applications. With the alarming rate of depletion of the major conventional energy resources such as Coal, Petroleum and Natural gas, coupled with the environmental degradation caused by the process of harnessing these energy sources, it has become an urgent necessity to invest in renewable energy resources that would power the future sufficiently without degrading the environment through green house gas emission. The energy potential of the sun is immense, but despite this unlimited solar energy resource, harvesting it is a challenge mainly because of the limited efficiency of the array cells. The best conversion efficiency of most commercially available solar cells is in the range 10- 20s% [1], [8]. Although recent breakthrough in the technology of solar cells shows significant improvement but the fact that the maximum solar cell efficiency still falls in the less than 20s% range shows there are enormous room for improvement. The goal of this thesis is to identify these rooms and ways to improving them. One of such room is array mounting and tracking mechanism that moves or positions solar array to absorbing extended solar irradiance for maximum power output.

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