A Comparative Performance Analysis between Serpentine-Flow Solar Water Heater and Photovoltaic Thermal Collector under Malaysian Climate Conditions

Abstract

Solar energy has increasingly been employed for domestic and industrial water heating. Both conventional solar water heater (SWH) and photovoltaic thermal (PVT) systems suffer from the drawback of poor energy conversion efficiency. In this article, a unique parallel serpentine-flow thermal collector has been designed and developed that has been employed as an isolated SWH and also integrated with a 32-cell monocrystalline photovoltaic (PV) module. Simulation models of both SWH and PVT systems have been built in TRNSYS to study their thermal performance numerically. Thereafter, outdoor experimental investigations have been conducted under the composite climates of Malaysia. Experimental results show very good agreement with the simulation outcomes with disparity less than 2%. At the optimum flow rate, the maximum thermal efficiencies of SWH and PVT are 82.5% and 74.62%, respectively. Superior water outlet temperature was obtained with SWH. Although SWH exhibits superior thermal performance, PVT’s additional electrical output might make it preferable for several applications.

A Comparative Investigation on Solar PVT- and PVT-PCM-Based Collector Constancy Performance

“…The collector slope is calculated by Cooper's equation (Equation ( 1)). The slope of the experimental collectors was kept at 15 • by combining Equations ( 1) and ( 2) [35,36].…”

“…The thermal performance of the PVT and PVT-PCM units are assessed, and the efficiency parameters are derived using the Hottel-Whillier-Bliss (HWB) [48] modified equations [35,45,[49][50][51][52][53][54]. According to Ibrahim et al (2014) [55] and Park et al (2014) [56], the following formulas are used to determine the thermal efficiency (η th ) of the conventional flat plate solar collector:…”

Review on Solar Assisted Heat Pump Water Heating System

“…Alam et al, 2021 [67] proposed that covering the flat plate evaporator with Cu0.44, Ti0.44, and Mn0.44 might increase its performance. The results demonstrate that the absorber absorbs 97.4% of the solar energy with the coating.…”

Design and Fabrication of a Mutual Control Electronic Circuit for Solar and Electrical Water Heating

“…The reason of its wide application is because of its viability and economics advantages [5]. In Malaysia, there are extensive research conducted to improve the performance of the solar water heater system [6] [7]. There are two wide categories of solar water heaters which are active and passive heaters.…”