Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451

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Journal of Building Engineering

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jobe

Real-time monitoring implementation of PV/T façade system based on IoT

Ruobing Liang a, Yifan Guo a, Liang Zhao b, c, *, Yan Gao a
a
Faculty of Infrastructure Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China
b
School of Control Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China
c
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Control and Optimization for Industrial Equipment of Ministry of Education, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: PV/T façade system is a novel style for solar renewable energy applications, which the system can improve the
Solar energy efficiency of the comprehensive utilization of solar energy. In order to research the performance of PV/T façade
PV/T module system, a modular remote monitoring system based on the Internet of Things and cloud platform technology is
Internet of thing
proposed, built, deployed as experimental prototype in this paper. The system collects temperature, pressure and
Remote monitoring
wind speed through two RS485 RTU modules, and transmits data to database on the cloud platform via 4G
network. The monitoring system allows authorized users to access real-time data or alarm information in a
remote way via a website or mobile application. Besides the PV/T System operating parameters, meteorological
data are also monitored to ensure a more complete analysis of performance. The proposed modular architecture
can be built easily and rapidly, and onsite experimental test shows the stability of the monitoring system, which
makes the system flexible enough for potential future modifications.

through PCs, capture cards, and dedicated commercial software. In

1. Introduction
With continuous development of economy and society, the con­
sumption of traditional energy sources such as oil and coal is increasing
day by day, and the shortage of energy is becoming more and more
severe, so it is urgent to find a sustainable development of clean energy
[1–3]. Solar energy as a source of clean energy has the advantages of
renewable, recyclable and non-polluting, which has gained huge
attention all over the world. From 2007 to 2019, the global scale of
maximizing the photovoltaic power generation increased from 8 GW to
402 GW, and the efficient use of solar energy has become a global focus
of solar energy development and research [4–8].
In order to improve the operating efficiency of a solar photovoltaic
system, real-time monitoring means are essential [9]. Through the
monitoring means, on the one hand, we can grasp the operation of solar
photovoltaic equipment in a timely manner, results in improve the
system heating and power generation efficiency, on the other hand,
through real-time monitoring, can be timely discovery of operation or
maintenance problems, prevent failures, extend the life of photovoltaic
systems.
Solar photovoltaic monitoring system has experienced several stages
of development. Most of the systems in the first stage are implemented
1997, Blaesser proposed a monitoring and controlling system to collect
onsite, store and analyze the performance of the PV system [10].
However, the data acquisition equipment used in this system was rather
expensive, which represented more than 10% of the total PV system
installation cost. PCI acquisition card and NI’s LabVIEW software is a
popular combination of this stage. National Instruments PCI-6024E
board was used to collect signals from sensors of renewable energy
systems [11], the display and storage software in the computer is
implemented by Labview software. Forero developed a system to mea­
sure the environmental variables of PV solar plants, which also used data
acquisition board and LabVIEW software [12]. The plant I–V curves
were collected with a sample interval of the 30s, and the collected data
are transmitted to PC by using the RS232 communication interface. The
Upgrade DAQ card NI has been adopted to monitor the data of a PV
module in Ref. [6], which transferred data to the computer via a USB
interface with higher acquisition accuracy and faster transfer rates. The
main disadvantage of this solution in this stage is its dependence on a
personal computer and the use of commercial software (LabVIEW),
which makes the cost of monitoring system out of budget, especially for
small experimental systems.
The traditional monitoring method of a solar photovoltaic system is
to install special commercial software on the computer and collect the

* Corresponding author. Room A711, Innovation Park Building, School of Control Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, No.2 Linggong Road,
Ganjingzi District, Dalian City, Liaoning Province, 116024, China.
E-mail address: zliang@dlut.edu.cn (L. Zhao).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2021.102451
Received 6 December 2020; Received in revised form 20 March 2021; Accepted 21 March 2021
Available online 27 March 2021
2352-7102/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Liang et al.
Nomenclature
APV PV module area
APV/T PV/T module area
Cp specific heat of the water
hi the inlet refrigerant enthalpy
ho the outlet refrigerant enthalpy
I the amount of solar radiation in the west elevation
M the flow of the refrigerant
mR the refrigerant flow rate
P the power generated by photovoltaic cells
Q the maximum heating power of PV/T module
Qs the quantity of obtained heat of the water
Q1 the quantity of absorbed heat of the first PV/T module
Qw heating capacity
Tw,τ1 the initial temperature of the water in the tank
Tw,τ2 the final temperature of the water in the tank
VP the volume of the liquid pipeline between the outlet of the
tank and the inlet of the PV/T module
VE the volume of the refrigerant inside the PV/T module
working parameters of the system into the computer by means of data
acquisition card or special data acquisition equipment [10,13–16]. So
there are the following problems:
(1) The cost is relatively high, the need for a dedicated computer, the
price of commercial software is not expensive
(2) Only a single solar photovoltaic system can be managed
(3) Complex wiring, the computer is located inside the building,
while the real system is located outside the building, results in a
longer wiring system, easy to cause interference, resulting in
measurement errors.
In order to reduce the cost of the monitoring system, the second
development period, some embedded development board as the form of
acquisition module gradually appeared, to replace the special collection
card. In 1998, Mukaro designed a low-cost data acquisition system based
on an 8-bit ST62E20 microcontroller for the PV system [13,14], which
used an A/D module to collect data from the sensor, and used RS232
communication interface to transmit data to the computer. Because of
the accuracy of the microcontroller and A/D acquisition module, this
solution does not give enough precision on measurements, but the cost is
greatly reduced. Eke proposed a multi-channel temperature measure­
ment system for PV system [17], in order to reduce the cost, the authors
connected 16 NTC temperature sensors to a 12-bit A/D module via a 16
channel multiplexer. The collected data are transmitted to a computer
via the RS232communication interface too. Besides the wired commu­
nication interface, in Ref. [18] authors presented a remote fault diag­
nosis meter for photovoltaic power generation systems via ZigBee
wireless sensor network and a single-chip PIC18F8720 microcontroller
is used to realize data acquisition. Shariff et al. [19] used two
PIC18F4553 microcontrollers to develop a ZigBee-based data acquisi­
tion system for the PV system. A DS1307 circuit was used as a real-time
clock and a 1024 Kbits EEPROM memory allowed 7 days of data storage.
In recent years, open-source hardware and software systems are gaining
the enthusiasm of researchers because the cost of open source is
significantly reduced and the system is more flexible and scalable, such
as PcDuino and Arduino, Raspberry (RPi) [20–23]. Fuentes designed a
low cost with a flexible architecture based on the Arduino open-source
electronic platform to monitor PV systems [20]. Gad et al. have imple­
mented an integrated low-cost temperature sensor for solar energy ap­
plications based on Arduino [21].
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things and
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Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
VC the volume of the refrigerant inside the heat exchanger
V volume
WR refrigerant pump power consumption
Ww water pump power consumption
Greek symbol
ρ the liquid density
ηe electrical efficiency
ηpower the generation efficiency of conventional thermal power
ηs the comprehensive performance of the PV/T façade system
ηth thermal efficiency
Abbreviations
APP application
BIPV building-integrated photovoltaic
BIPV/T building-integrated photovoltaic/thermal
COP thermal performance coefficient of the system
PV photovoltaic
PV/T photovoltaic/thermal
information technology, the trend of using the Internet of Things to
control devices is becoming more and more obvious. IoT technology
combines sensor perception technology, Internet technology, and
intelligent platform technology to realize the comprehensive collection
of information, real-time transmission and intelligent processing
[24–28]. Distributed solar photovoltaic system located in different
geographical locations can be unified access to cloud platform for
centralized monitoring, maintenance to achieve unrelated information
interrelation and make the operating system more intelligent, so as to
provide more effective and reasonable management, which results in
achieving comprehensive collection of information, real-time trans­
mission and intelligent processing [8,9]. It is of great significance to the
development and application of solar energy system.
The BS architecture monitoring system based on Internet of things
and cloud platform came into being in this context. The characteristics
of these systems are distributed and networked, and users can access
monitoring data anytime, anywhere through the web or mobile phone,
and the real-time performance of the system is much better than the
previous two phases. Villagrán designed an environmental monitoring
network composed of eight meteorological stations based on the LP3500
controller and GSM modem [29]. The monitoring data could be trans­
mitted by SMS message, which makes the system suitable for remote
areas. In Ref. [30], the operating data of PV plant inverters is monitored
by the STM32F407 microcontroller, and the user could view the infor­
mation by a Web browser. In Ref. [31], Pereira presented a monitoring
system for three grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) plants. The online
Web Monitor allowed authorized users to access the database in a cloud
platform. In Ref. [8], the authors proposed distributed real-time moni­
toring system for small solar home systems, the system has been
installed at three sites (Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, Spain), Linares (Jaén,
Spain) and Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico)) with the IEC standard accuracy
requirements. This paper combines the cloud platform of Internet of
things with PVT double facade system, and makes the following
contributions:
⋅ The monitoring system is simple in layout and low in price.
⋅ Multiple PV systems can be managed at the same time.
⋅ The monitoring results can be obtained on the website anytime and
anywhere through mobile phone or computer.
Our research team has been working on solar energy-related fields
since 2010, including solar heat pump technology, solar photovoltaic
R. Liang et al.
photo thermal integration technology, and so on [7,16,32–34]. In the
past research, we used data collector KEITHLEY 2700, which is a
six-and-a-half multi-digit multimeter, to collect all the experimental
data to the computer. The collector can offer spreadsheets in CSV format
on the computer. The disadvantage of this system is that it cannot pro­
vide real-time data monitoring and presentation, and can only be used in
one experimental system. To this end, this paper will adopt the Internet
of Things technology and cloud platform technology to develop a
real-time and distributed solar energy monitoring system. The rest of the
paper is as follows: Section II describes the related studies in recent
years. In Sections III, describes the structure of experimental PV/T
monitoring platform, include sensors, data acquisition and communi­
cation system, and the software in cloud platform. Section IV presents
the monitoring results and data analysis. Finally, the conclusion is in
section V.
2. Hardware system
In this study, the experimental platform was located at the Institute
of Building Energy, Dalian University of Technology, China (coordinates
N38.9◦ , E121.44◦ ). Based on the previously established PV/T building
facade system [35], combined with the Internet of things technology, a
real-time monitoring cloud platform based on B/S architecture is
Fig. 1. The schematic picture of PV/T building façade.
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Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
established.
2.1. PV/T experimental system
The PV/T double-layer façade system proposed in this paper is a
solar-powered cogeneration system that takes the new PV/T component
as the exterior skin of the building, which is designed to make reason­
able use of the building facade space and convert solar energy into
electrical and thermal energy that can be used in the building. At the
same time, as an active design of the architectural structure of the
building, the structure can also improve the thermal performance of the
building enclosure structure. Solar energy through PV/T components
can produce both electrical energy and hot water for building use. The
working principle is: when the sun shines on the building facade, which
will be blocked and absorbed by the PV/T façade mounted on the
building, some of which is converted into electricity through photo­
voltaic cells, the rest of them converted into heat.
The photovoltaic system is connected to the circuit breaker via the
inverters and integrated into the grid, and the real-time power genera­
tion of the photovoltaic system is recorded by the monitor and router
and uploaded to the database for storage. The optical heat system is
mainly composed of PV/T components, refrigerant pumps, plate heat
exchangers, pumps, heat storage water tanks, etc., the schematic picture
R. Liang et al. Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451

of the optical heat system is shown in Fig. 1. Refrigerant through the PV/ 2.2.1. Sensors
T facade to absorb heat and then enter into the plate heat exchanger and Temperature measuring points of the monitoring system were
release heat energy to prepare domestic hot water, and then pumped by recorded by Pt100. There are eight temperature sensors located on the
the refrigerant pump into the PV/T facade, to complete a cycle. The surface of the PV/T plant, four on the outside surface and four are on the
optical heat system mainly includes the measurement of temperature, inside surface. There are five temperature sensors located in the cavity
pressure, flow rate, wind speed, irradiance, etc. The measuring in­ between the PV/T plant and the wall evenly distributed, and there are
struments are shown in Table 1. three temperature sensors on the wall. The installations of temperature
The proposed Roll-bond PV/T module is composed of a glass cover sensors are shown in Fig. 4 (a), (b), (c).
plate, a photovoltaic cell sheet, TPT, an EVA adhesive, and a single-side Besides temperature sensors, the data acquisition system also in­
inflatable flat plate collector. The size of a single component is 1.56 m × cludes pressure meter, flowmeters, and wind speed sensor, shown in
0.78 m, the heat-collecting area is 1.2 m2, the power generation capacity Fig. 4 (d), (e), (f). Solar irradiance and wind speed sensor can be
is 4.2 W, and the module’s photovoltaic cell coverage is 64%. Under measured by meteorological stations. The Modbus RTU is responsible for
standard test conditions, the maximum heating power of the PV/T collecting temperature and wind speed, and the other measurement
module is 800 W when the solar radiation intensity is 1000 W/m2 and meters communicate to the gateway via the RS485 interface. The pa­
the ambient temperature is 25 ◦ C, and the maximum electrical efficiency rameters of various sensors and measuring instruments are presented in
is 16%. Table 1.
The flow range of the refrigerant pump used in this experiment is
0–0.25 m3/h, the maximum lift is 500 kPa; The plate heat exchanger 2.2.2. Data acquisition and communication system
selects the fluorine-water exchanger BL26-18, the heat transfer medium Fig. 5 shows a photograph of the realized prototype. The power
is R134a and water, the heat transfer power is 5 kW; The type of the supply of the system was provided by 24Vdc voltage regulators, which
liquid storage tank is BLR-233, the storage capacity is 4 L. In order to was used to supply the RTU and gateway modules. Fig. 6 shows the
ensure the inlet of the refrigerant pump and PV/T component are liquid, RS485 RTU collector module, which has twelve PT100 interfaces. A total
the tank is installed between the outlet of the exchanger and the inlet of of twenty-one temperatures (eight PT100s on the surface of PV/T plant,
the refrigerant pump; The type of the dry filter is EK-164S, the diameter five PT100sin the cavity, three PT100s on the wall, two PT100s for water
is ϕ10 mm; The capacity of the storage tank is 150 L; The type of the inlet and outlet, two PT100s for refrigerant inlet and outlet and one
pump is SRT25-6AS, the flow range of the pump is 0–52 L/min, the PT100 for the storage tank) sensors are deployed in the experiment, so 2
maximum lift is 6 m. The above experimental devices are shown as RTU modules are required. Except for the PT100 acquisition interface,
Fig. 2b, c, d. the RTU still has four channels of 4–20 mA interfaces, which were used
The micro inverter used in this experimental system is the EVT500 to collect wind speed and flowmeters. Besides these sensors, meteoro­
micro inverter with a maximum input power of 600 W, the working logical communication to a gateway via the RS485 interface, and the
voltage range of 18–54 V and the maximum output AC power of 500w. detail communication parameters are shown in Table 1.
Photovoltaic power generation monitor uploads PV power generation The main function of the gateway in this system to collect the data
data to the monitoring platform, including the instantaneous power and from different sensors periodically via the RS485 interface. The
power generation of each PV/T component connected to an inverter. configuration of the gateway is realized by the online tool on the cloud
The above experimental devices are shown as Fig. 2e and f. platform, includes the communication address, starting position and
transmission data length of each sensor. The gateway connects to the
2.2. Data acquisition and communication system cloud platform via 4G, and the operation of the gateway is not limited by
location, as long as there is a network signal that can be accessed to the
Fig. 3 shows the diagram of the monitoring system, which includes a cloud platform. When the sensor is not online or the device failure, the
diagram of photothermal and photoelectric as well as the architecture of gateway will repeat the acquisition three times, and the fault informa­
IoT, and cloud platform. The gateway collects meteorological and sensor tion is reported to the cloud platform if there is still no feedback data
parameters; data is sent via 4G and information is stored in distributed after three acquisition instructions. At the same time, the platform will
data servers of the cloud platform. The database of the cloud platform send an SMS or an email message to the user. After the gateway gath­
adopts the technology of dynamic separation, load balancing, cluster ering all sensor data, it will send data to the data center in the cloud
ingress, guarantees the stable operation of the service under the condi­ platform as the form of MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport).
tion of high concurrency and a large volume of access, and the system
automatically backs up the data, thus ensuring the security of the 3. Software implementation
monitoring data.
In this paper, the software implementation mainly includes two
parts. First is the data acquisition software, data processing software and
data sending software in the gateway, and the main program flowchart
Table 1 of gateway is shown in Fig. 7. After the system is initialized the sensors
Measuring instrument parameter. data is collected by gateway and stored in MQTT packet. After that,
gateway will send data will send packet at the periodical time.
Devices Type Range Precision
The other is software in cloud, which has real-time display function,
Temperature Pt100 − 20–100 ◦ C ±0.1 ◦ C historical data query function, data alarm management, access permis­
sensor
Pressure CYYZ11-H 0~4 MPa ±0.25%FS
sion management function. Data obtained from a data acquisition sys­
transmitter tem are published via a web server, and authorized users can log into the
Wind speed CHWVN 0~3 m/s ±0.2%FS system by username and password, from any device or computer. Multi-
transmitter
3
user concurrent access is supported. Users can view the device’s real-
Turbine JST-LWG- 0.15–1.5 m / ±0.5%FS
time data, alarm push, real-time curves, historical data, remote manip­
flowmeter 10Y h
Mass flowmeter LHD8MH01 0–260 kg/h ±0.15/±0.20% ulation, and other functions remotely via Web or mobile app.
Pyranometer TBQ-2 <5%FS(The error of the Monitoring system development on cloud platforms is achieved by
accuracy of the sun’s configuration, WYSIWYG, namely what you see is what you get [36].
position) The advantages of configuration development are modular program­
Inverter EVT500
ming, low difficulty, and fast implementation. Fig. 8-(a), Fig. 8-(b) and

4
R. Liang et al.
Fig. 2. Main experimental equipment.
Fig. 3. Architecture of developed IoT monitoring system.
Fig. 8-(c) illustrate the main page and distribution point monitoring
page of the system.
In Fig. 8-(a) and Fig. 8-(b), environmental parameters, refrigerant
circulation system parameters and water circulation system parameters
are displayed. The distributed multipoint monitoring page can be
accessed by clicking the button of “M-points” on the house. The tem­
perature sensors’ distribution of this page is based on the distribution of
the experimental platform. The structure diagram on the left side of
Fig. 8-(c) could help users to understand the internal composition of the
PV/T plant.
In addition to the monitoring system shown on these two pages, the
application on the cloud platform offers the below function.
• Monitoring charts, in one day, one week or by setting period by user-
defined. This module includes two parts: real-time curve and his­
torical curve. The real-time curve is used to display the real-time
dynamic changes of the data to monitor the control stability of the
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Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
equipment under the changing conditions of the site. The monitored
parameters displayed in the graph can be single, such as only T1, or
multiple at the same time. For example, T1-T16 are displayed on a
graph at the same time, which is convenient for users to understand
all the parameters and perform comparative analysis. In addition, the
real-time curve also has a smooth movement display function. The
historical curve reflects the changing trend of the parameters in the
past period of time, as shown in Fig. 8-(d). It can be used to sum­
marize the objective laws through the query of user-defined time or
default period, which has certain statistical significance.
• Historical data query and export function, shown as in Fig. 8-(e), the
system provides data in CVS format. In the era of big data, the
accumulation of data is conducive to information tracing, and can be
used for fault analysis and strategy formulation of solar photovoltaic
system. In addition, historical data queries can be performed through
a custom time, and data in CSV format can be exported to a local
computer, which is conducive to data sharing and in-depth analysis
between industries.
• Setting alarm values for monitoring parameters. By setting the upper
and lower limits of the parameters, when the temperature, pressure,
flow and other values of the PV/T facade system are too high, the
system should be able to promptly prompt risks. In addition, it
should be possible to customize risk text descriptions to facilitate
non-technical personnel to grasp the cause of the system alarm.
Through this module, users can see detailed alarm information,
including alarm time, alarm equipment, alarm parameters, alarm
description, whether it has been confirmed, etc. Furthermore, users
can also query the historical alarm records of a certain device,
analyze the reasons for the failure of the device, so as to improve the
process or replace the equipment.
• Display multiple monitoring points as map format for quick access.
Considering scalability, the system should be able to serve multiple
PV/T facade systems. For convenient access, the cloud platform in­
tegrates geographic information system (GIS) technology, which
displays PV/T facade systems distributed in multiple regions on a
map, which can be zoomed and the geographic location is accurate to
R. Liang et al.
Fig. 4. The measurement sensors used in system.
Fig. 5. Pictures of assembled prototype of data acquisition system.
the street. Each monitored PV/T facade system is assigned a hot link.
Hover the mouse on the respective hot link to display a brief intro­
duction of the system. By clicking this hot link, authorized users can
proceed to the home page of the monitoring system.
• Input the evaluation formula of PV/T system, real-time online
monitoring system performance. The application interface is
reserved in the cloud platform system. By adding the performance
evaluation algorithm, the temperature, pressure, flow and other
parameters in the real-time data are correlated and combined to
realize the online monitoring of PV/T performance, including the
calculation of the comprehensive efficiency, heat conversion effi­
ciency and photoelectric conversion efficiency of the system. More­
over, their values can be displayed on the interface in real time and
stored in the database.
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Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
Fig. 6. RS485 RTU collector module.
4. Result analysis
4.1. System performance evaluation formula
In the process of software development, adding performance evalu­
ation algorithm can realize on-line monitoring of PVT performance. The
performance evaluation formula of PVT is as follows:
The heating capacity of the PV/T façade system can be calculated by
the following formula.
[ ]
Qw = ρCp V Tw,τ2 − Tw,τ1 (1)
Where, Qw is heating capacity, kJ. ρ is the density of water, kg/m3. Cp is
the specific heat of water, kJ/(kg⋅◦ C). V is volume, m3. Tw,τ1 is the initial
temperature of the water in the tank, ◦ C. Tw,τ2 is the final temperature of
the water in the tank, ◦ C.
The heating COP of the PV/T façade system can be calculated by the
following formula.
R. Liang et al. Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451

Fig. 7. Main program flowchart. Fig. 8. Online web-page monitoring system.

7
R. Liang et al.
Qw
COP = ∑
(WR + WW )
Where, COP is thermal performance coefficient of the system; WR is
refrigerant pump power consumption, W; Ww is water pump power
consumption, W.
The thermal efficiency of PV/T façade system is,
Qw
ηth =
IAPV/T
Where, ηth is thermal efficiency, %; I is the amount of solar radiation, W/
m2; APV/T is PV/T module area, m2.
The electrical efficiency formula is as follows.
ηe =
P
IAPV
Where, ηe is electrical efficiency, %. P is the power generated by
photovoltaic cells, W. APV is PV area, m2.
The comprehensive performance of PV/T façade system is
ηs =
ηe
+ ηth
ηpower
Where, ηs is the comprehensive performance of the PV/T façade system,
%. ηpower is the generation efficiency of conventional thermal power, the
value of 0.38.
4.2. Result analysis
The raw monitoring data downloaded from the monitoring system
can be processed and analyzed to produce more information that can be
easily understandable by researchers, and the information is represented
in graphs as shown in Fig. 9 – Fig. 12.
The outdoor meteorological parameters during the experimental
period including ambient temperature, solar radiation intensity are
presented in Fig. 9. During the week of the experiment (Sep.24-Sep.30),
the weather was sunny, with a maximum temperature of 30.6 ◦ C during
the day, a minimum temperature of 22.2 ◦ C in the night with an average
temperature of 25.26 ◦ C. The maximum solar irradiance is 1188 W/m2
on Sept.24 with an average solar irradiance of 732 W/m2.
Fig. 10 describes a view of all the temperatures monitored in the
system. In Fig. 10 (a), the changing trend of temperatures on the surface
of the PV/T plant is consistent with the trend of solar irradiance.
Furthermore, the temperatures of T1 and T2 at the bottom of the PV/T
plant are significantly lower than that of the remaining 6 monitoring
points on the surface. The reason for this phenomenon is that the
Fig. 9. The curves of solar radiation and ambient temperature.
Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
position of these two points is relatively lower, and the sun’s direct
(2)
striking time is less than the other monitoring points. The temperature of
the monitoring point increases as the distribution position increases as
shown in Fig. 10 (b). However, unlike the temperature points on the
surface, there is no significant correlation between the monitoring
points in these cavities and the solar irradiance. In addition to solar
irradiance, wind speed is also an important factor affecting the tem­
perature in the cavity. The temperature change characteristics of the
(3) monitoring points on the wall also increase with the increase in the
position as shown in Fig. 10 (c). Fig. 10 (d) describes the temperature of
the water tank, the inlet and outlet temperatures of water and refrig­
erant, respectively. During the experiment, the water in the storage tank
is drained every night and refilled with 20 ◦ C water the next day. It can
be seen that, after an afternoon operation, the system can heat the water
(4) from 20 ◦ C to about 40 ◦ C, which could meet the need of hot water in
daily life. Besides that, it can be clearly seen that the temperature
changes of the water system lag behind the refrigerant temperature, and
the temperature difference is always maintained at about 5.5 ◦ C.
Fig. 11 shows the pressure changing curves inlet and outlet. The
flows of water and refrigerant are displayed in Fig. 12. Compared with
(5) the flow of refrigerant, the water flow is stable with a maximum value of
0.87 m3/h and a minimum value of 0.84 m3/h. The flow change of the
work quality is random because the process of gasification occasionally
occurs in the pipeline, which causes the flow of the work mass to fluc­
tuate greatly.
In order to evaluate the performance of the improved curtain wall
PV/T system, this paper analyzes the data of September 29, with a
maximum temperature of 30.6 ◦ Cduring the test period, an average
temperature of 29.0 ◦ C, a maximum wind speed of 2.3 m/s, and an
average wind speed of 0.4 m/s; west facade maximum radiation in­
tensity 752.15 W/m2, average radiation intensity 562 W/m2; heat
storage tank volume of 150 L, and initial water temperature of 23 ◦ C.
Fig. 13 is the PV/T façade system photoelectric, optical heat and total
efficiency change curve, the average comprehensive efficiency of the
system is 42%, the average optical heat conversion efficiency is 20%, the
average photoelectric conversion efficiency is 8%. During the experi­
mental test, the comprehensive efficiency of the system is consistent
with the change trend of the optical heat conversion efficiency, and the
efficiency of photoelectric conversion is maintained at about 8%. The
photoelectric, optical heat and comprehensive efficiency of the system
from 12:00 to 16:00 is maintained at a high value, and after 16:00 due to
the rapid reduction of solar radiation intensity, the system photoelectric,
optical heat and the comprehensive efficiency of the reduction is faster.
As shown in Fig. 14, the maximum value of COP is 7.6, which appears in
the initial stage of the experiment. The system may be unstable at the
beginning of operation, so it deviates far from the mean value. During
the whole experiment, the average value of COP was 4, and the change
trend of COP was basically synchronized with the solar radiation
intensity.
5. Conclusion
IoT based real-time data acquisition and monitoring systems are
important to supervise the operation, information, and the performance
of the PV/T façade system. A modular monitoring system for PV/T plant
is designed, built and tested based on IoT and cloud platform in this
paper, which allows users to access real-time data or alarm information
in a remote way via a website or mobile application. The system collects
the temperature, pressure, flow and meteorological data by RS485 col­
lector, and transmits the data to the data server in the cloud platform
through the gateway. Online monitoring data is password protected and
only authorized users can access the system.
The experimental results show that the average comprehensive ef­
ficiency of the system is 42%, with heat conversion efficiency is 20%,
and the average photoelectric conversion efficiency is 8%. The tem­
perature on the PV/T surface change along with solar irradiation and the
8
R. Liang et al. Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451

Fig. 10. Temperatures monitored by the system.

Fig. 12. Flow of water and refrigerant.

Fig. 11. Pressure of inlet and outlet.
system to replace existing data collectors, in order to reduce the cost of
water in the storage tank could be heated about 20 ◦ C during the sunny the system, and meet the system’s further industrialization demand.
day. As future works, a backup local storage system (such as SD card)
could be added in case of data loss due to network broke down. In
addition, we could develop an embedded module-based data acquisition

9
R. Liang et al.
Fig. 13. Curves of system efficiency.
Fig. 14. System COP along with solar radiation intensity.
Author statement
I have made substantial contributions to the conception or the design
of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the
work; and I have drafted the work or revised it critically for important
intellectual content; And I have approved the final version to be pub­
lished; And I agree to accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring
that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work
are appropriately investigated and resolved.
All persons who have made substantial contributions to the work
reported in the manuscript, including those who provided editing and
writing assistance but who are not authors, are named in the Ac­
knowledgments section of the manuscript and have given their written
permission to be named.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the National Key Research and
Development Project of China No. 2017YFC0704100 (entitled New
Generation Intelligent Building Platform Techniques), the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61803067), the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (DUT20JC45,
DUT20JC15), the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(No.52008073) and the Liaoning Natural Science Foundation of China
(2019-zd-0142).
10
Journal of Building Engineering 41 (2021) 102451
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