Development, optimization, and testing of a hybrid solar panel concept with energy harvesting enhancement

Abstract

Photovoltaics (PV) is one of the important technologies for electricity generation from renewable energies today and has an excellent environmental sustainability. It is a fast-growing market worldwide and also offers opportunities for aviation to intensify the use of renewable sources. Although the efficiency of PV systems has increased to a certain extent in recent years, a predominant part of solar radiation acting on a PV system is still lost to the environment through reflection and convection as well as heat radiation from the heated PV system. In addition, the efficiency of these systems decreases with increasing heating. Possible solutions for energy harvesting of this energy loss through thermoelectric (TE) have been investigated theoretically and in part experimentally in various cases but have not yet been transferred to larger PV systems. At the same time, cooling the PV system through thermogenerators (TEG) allows its efficiency to be increased. This contribution presents first results from investigations into the design and testing of hybrid PV/TEG systems, which aim to increase the efficiency and improve economic manufacturability of such systems. Among others, important design aspects of hybrid PV/TEG systems and integration of IoT elements (Internet of Things) are addressed and the development of an analytical model to optimise hybrid systems is presented.