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In 21th century demand for energy is rapidly increasing as the population is increased. To provide desirable living conditions and satisfy the food needs of overpopulated humanity getting harder and harder due to the limited energy and nutrient resources. Nutrient sources pass through many stages such as heating, cooling, drying and freezing which includes thermal and electrical energy needs before being presented to the consumer in the food industry. In the current situation, these two main energy requirements are largely met by fossil fuels which are not efficient, unsustainable and not user friendly in terms of resource management. In this context, the possibilities of usage Photovoltaic-Thermal (PV/T) solar energy systems which will be able to eliminate these disadvantages, use solar energy as a source and can meet the thermal and electrical requirements of the facility continuously has been investigated and, a system was designed which can meet the energy needs according to different scenarios for different processes. It is aimed to produce food in low carbon-emission facilities by meeting both electrical and thermal energy from the solar energy which is a renewable and clean energy source.

The integrated usage of solar energy systems, heat pump applications, and thermal energy storage units is an effective way for heating systems due to their sustainability and stability in operations. In this study, a novel direct solar-assisted heat pump with thermal energy system has been designed which uses the solar collector as the evaporator of the heat pump. Besides, two-dimensional transient numeric analyses have been conducted for the thermal energy storage unit using the ANSYS Fluent 16.2 commercial software package. With this direct system, the heat required for heating systems is supplied from the condenser with the heat received from the solar collector of the working fluid. For an effective and high performance system, the solar collector is designed as a double-pass which provided superheating of the working fluid. It is aimed to store the surplus energy from the solar energy in the thermal energy storage unit and to operate the system continuously and efficiently in both sunny and overcast weather conditions. Furthermore, the system has been analyzed theoretically and the results show that coefficient of performance may improve. As a result, this newly designed system can be successfully applied for thermal applications.

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