Improving the Power Efficiency of a PV Power Generation System Using a Proposed Electrochemical Heat Engine Embedded in the System

An important issue in the photovoltaic (PV) power generation systems is the massive amount of heat wasted by PV modules/panels. For the first time, this paper provides a new solution to recover a portion of the mentioned waste heat by utilizing a proposed electrochemical heat engine. A thermally regenerative electrochemical cycle (TREC) system has been designed, constructed, and embedded in a PV power generation system including a 200-W PV module to harvest the waste heat of its PV module, so a PV-TREC hybrid system has been organized and built. The hot cell of the TREC system has been positioned in direct contact with the backside of the PV module, and the cold cell is in direct contact with a heat sink located in the shade of the PV module. Experimental verifications demonstrate that the proposed TREC system efficiently converts the waste heat into electric power ranging from 0.1 to 54.5 W. In this manner, up to 6% of the waste heat of the PV module is recovered. It also substantiated that the daily energy efficiency of the PV-TREC hybrid system is improved by 27.5% compared to a usual PV system, and this is the main contribution and novelty of this paper.