A fully coupled numerical simulation of a hybrid concentrated photovoltaic/thermal system that employs a therminol VP-1 based nanofluid as a spectral beam filter

The realistic numerical modelling of multiphysics applications is an efficient way to precisely predict the operation of concentrated solar systems. Although many multiphysics conjugating approaches have been proposed in the literature, it is difficult to adopt such methods into simulating complex concentrated solar technologies. Consequently, this study introduces a novel 2D:3D numerical optical, thermal and electric coupling approach for a hybrid compound parabolic concentrator photovoltaic/thermal (CPC-PV/T) collector using a nanofluid as a spectral beam filter. In this approach, the volumetric absorbed radiation in each component of the system obtained from the non-gray 2D model is patched into the 3D model as a volumetric heat source using sophisticated computational tools. The main features of the full coupling method (FCM) are extensively analyzed and compared with the other two coupling methods previously adopted. Further, the module performance has been investigated employing both the nanofluid and base-fluid spectrum filters (BF-filter) compared with a stand-alone concentrated PV cell. From findings, the FCM can be applied to reveal more realistic operation characteristics of the proposed system compared with the other approaches, since the FCM can take into account the non-uniformity of solar illumination and the direction of reflected solar beams upon the receiver, along with the variation in the optical characteristics of utilized materials over the solar irradiance. Additionally, suspending indium tin oxide (ITO) nanoparticles into the Therminol VP1 oil raises the absorption rate over the thermal-bands with 62.5% higher than the use of BF-filter, whilst the cell temperature and the transmitted irradiance within the PV-band are obviously declined.