A Comparative Energy and Exergy Study on the Performance of Passive, Active, and Hybrid Cooling Methods for Air-Based Photovoltaic-Thermal Collectors: An Experimental Study

Numerous active, passive, and hybrid cooling methods have been developed to enhance the efficiency of air-based photovoltaic-thermal (PV/T) collectors. This study presents a unified and robust experimental platform to analyze and compare these cooling strategies. Accordingly, three scenarios were designed and tested outdoors: a passive strategy utilizing encapsulated PCM units and natural convection, an active strategy employing forced convection, and a hybrid strategy combining both passive and active approaches. The experimental results revealed that the hybrid strategy demonstrated the most effective cooling performance, with the PV module reaching maximum temperatures of 90 °C, 75 °C, and 65 °C under the passive, active, and hybrid strategies, respectively. Correspondingly, the hybrid approach achieved the highest daily electrical efficiency of 9.83%, compared to 9.33% and 8.03% for the passive and active strategies. The daily thermal efficiencies were 4.02%, 57.34%, and 54.22% for the passive, active, and hybrid strategies, respectively. Meanwhile, the daily overall efficiencies were 29.94%, 79.66%, and 81.55% for the passive, active, and hybrid strategies, respectively. The highest exergy efficiency—approximately 10.88%—was also recorded under the hybrid configuration. In conclusion, although the passive and active strategies are both cost-effective and efficient, the hybrid strategy delivers the best overall performance, albeit at a higher cost.