Volume 15: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part IV

Comparative study and performance assessment of solar energy harvesting pavements Senji Li, Wenbo Gu, Salman Ahmed, Tao Ma

Abstract

Road pavements have tremendous potential in solar energy harvesting since they occupy a great share of urban surface and can absorb abundant solar radiation. Pavement-integrated photovoltaic (PIPV) module, pavement-integrated solar thermal (PIST) module, and pavement-integrated photovoltaic thermal (PIPVT) module are typical solar energy harvesting pavement modules that have emerged in the past few years. In this study, the performance of these modules was assessed and compared through numerical simulations on the weather conditions of four typical days representing different seasons in Shanghai. The results show that the PIPVT module can generate slightly more electricity than the PIPV module, while output less heat compared with the PIST module on all typical days. The PIPVT module can achieve the average overall energy efficiency of 37.31% considering both electricity and heat yields. Additionally, all three solar energy harvesting pavement modules have positive impact on mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effect, and the PIPVT and PIST module can mitigate the UHI effect most and least significantly, respectively.

Keywords Pavement-integrated photovoltaic (PIPV); Pavement-integrated solar thermal (PIST); Pavementintegrated photovoltaic thermal (PIPVT); Performance comparison; Urban heat island (UHI).