Numerical investigation of the effects of a copper foam filled with phase change materials in a water-cooled photovoltaic/thermal system

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the thermal performance of a photovoltaic/thermal system, integrated with phase change materials in porous medium. For this purpose, a metal foam was employed as porous medium and the performance of five different PCMs, as organic and inorganic, were examined as well. Moreover, the effects of different key parameters such as the mass flow rate, solar irradiance, inlet water temperature and inclination were studied. Finally, the simulation results were compared with a water-cooled photovoltaic/thermal without incorporating PCMs and porous medium, and thermal performance of the three PV/T cases were reported. The highest thermal efficiency of the system was reported as 83% in case of 0.02 kg s-1 mass flow rate and using Paraffin C22 as the storage material. In addition, the incorporation of porous medium resulted in better temperature distribution, and the porosity of 0.8 was resulted in higher thermal performance. Furthermore, the results were validated with an experimental study, and good agreement was reported. At last, the exergy analysis was applied on the system, and the results showed that the exergy efficiency of the PV/T module with metal foam filled with PCM was 16.7%.