Photovoltaic Thermal Technologies for Medium Temperature Industrial Application A Global TRNSYS Performance Comparison

New solar innovative designs aim to optimize energy output per space unit. This innovation appears in solar technologies where solar thermal collectors are used to generate heat and photovoltaic technologies are used to generate electricity. Many researchers propose new designs that increase the system output temperature, easily integrated on factories rooftops and combine both technologies into one hybrid system to increase the exergy efficiency. In this paper, several designs were compared for a medium temperature industrial application using the software TRNSYS. At a certain location, it is found that 36.8% solar contribution can be achieved by a Photovoltaic thermal (PVT) collector when there is no flow in the integrated Chanel under the photovoltaic (PV) panel (same scenario as using normal PV panels) compared to 38.1% solar contribution when there is a coolant fluid flow. Beam-split PVT collector was compared in this study with several bandpass filter bandwidths based on the available literature. PVT beam split collector can achieve 49% solar contribution like the regular solar thermal collector contribution. A side to side Photovoltaic and solar thermal collectors with several rooftop ratios were also compared. The results indicate that the solar contribution of the individual systems besides each other can achieve 6% solar fraction less than the beam split collector. DNI ratio at various locations is a dominant factor in determining the best solar technology.