Comparison of Performance Analysis of the Ventilated and Nonventilated CIGS BIPV Units

CIGS thin film solar cells are technically suitable for BIPV applications than regularly used crystalline silicon solar cells. Particularly, CIGS PV has lower temperature coefficient than crystalline silicon PV, thus decrease in power generation is lowered in CIGS PV. Moreover, CIGS PV can decrease shading loss when applied to the BIPV system, and the total annual power generation is higher than crystalline silicon. However, there are few studies on the installation factors affecting the performance of BIPV system with CIGS module. In this study, BIPV curtain wall unit with CIGS PV module was designed. To prevent increase of temperature of CIGS PV module by solar radiation, ventilation was considered at the backside of the unit. The thermal specification and electrical performance of CIGS PV of the ventilated unit was analyzed experimentally. Non-ventilated unit was also investigated and compared with ventilated unit. The results showed that the average CIGS temperature of the ventilated curtain wall unit was 6.8°C lower than non-ventilated type and the efficiency and power generation performance of ventilated CIGS PV on average was, respectively, about 6% and 5.8% higher than the non-ventilated type.