Frankfurt am Main, 22 July 2024 – Consolar Solare Energiesysteme GmbH, the Frankfurt-based specialist for highly efficient solar technology, is pleased to announce a new patent for the SOLINK PVT heat pump collector: the proven collector design – already protected in Germany, Europe and China – has now also been patented by the United States Patent Office.
‘We are proud that our internationally proven technology, which we have invested a lot of time and energy in developing, has now also been patented and thus protected in the USA,’ says Dr Ulrich Leibfried, Managing Director and Head of Development at Consolar. ‘More and more PVT collectors are now being coupled with heat pumps, but often cannot serve as the sole heat source of a heat pump like SOLINK due to their design. This is made possible by the patented SOLINK concept.’ Consolar does not want to prevent the concept from being used by international companies in the heating and heat pump industry, on the contrary: ‘Scalable production will soon be launched with our production partner AKG with worldwide production sites, and we are happy to supply OEM partners under their brand,’ explains Leibfried.
The SOLINK PVT air-brine collectors are a new generation of PVT collectors that have been specially developed for heat pumps. The patented large-area heat exchanger on the underside of the collector supplements solar thermal heat generation with energy from the air and enables a heat pump to be supplied with heat even at night, without an additional heat source. Conventional PVT collectors have a flat heat exchanger on the back of the PV module, which utilises the waste heat not used by the PV module, e.g. to regenerate a geothermal probe.
Consolar and Triple Solar, with whom the collector was jointly developed, applied for a patent in Germany back in August 2016. Patents for Europe and China were granted in November 2020 and May 2021. The patent for the SOLINK PVT air-brine collector protects the structure in which the heat exchanger surface is not connected to the PV laminate over a flat surface, but is formed by vertically positioned fins. This results in a much larger heat exchanger surface to the air – the heat exchanger in the SOLINK is eight times as large as the PV surface. The patented structure is designed to maximise heat transfer to the air and minimise ice formation.
The proven design of the SOLINK heat pump collector has now also been patented by the United States Patent Office.