Multi-physics Based Energy Yield Modelling of a Hybrid Concentrated Solar Power/Photovoltaic System with Spectral Beam Splitting

Hybrid concentrated solar power/photovoltaic systems (CSP/PV) combine the advantages of the two separate systems while reducing their drawbacks. The design of such a hybrid system is challenging due to the various trade-offs between the thermal and electrical performance, and the overall system complexity. A reliable simulation model that includes all relevant optical, thermal, and photovoltaic aspects, can therefore be extremely useful to analyse the combined system performance and fine-tune the various design parameters. While multi-physics modelling of photovoltaic systems is well established, this is not the case for hybrid CSP/PV. In this paper, a novel multi-physics framework is presented for a hybrid system consisting of a parabolic trough with integrated PV cells covered by a dichroic coating, focusing incident sunlight towards a thermal receiver. Instead of monofacial PV cells, bifacial cells are considered for harvesting also the diffuse and ground reflected light at the back of the trough. The presented framework relies on an existing simulation tool for PV modules, that is combined with a ray-tracer that includes the spectral beam splitting functionality of the coating, and a novel 1.5D thermal model for the receiver tube. Long term outdoor monitoring results are used to predict the averaged, time-resolved annular thermal and electric energy yield of the system. This energy production is compared for three different multilayer coating designs with an increasing amount of (TiO2, SiO2) layers. These results show that the amount of reflected sunlight towards the thermal receiver can be enhanced at the expense of the transmitted sunlight towards the PV cells, when a higher number of layers are used. The reduction of the incident power on the PV cells is however almost fully compensated by the enhanced spectral match of the transmitted light with the spectral response of the considered bifacial cells, in addition to the enhanced cell efficiency due to the lower thermalization losses. This results in superior system efficiency, for the application scenario where the generated thermal energy is also converted in electrical energy, and geographical locations with sufficient direct sunlight; a conclusion that is drawn from comparing the total electrical energy yield in Spain and Belgium, as a function of the thermal to electrical conversion fraction.